Ana_Cotta – saudades da Amazônia

Tools, Events, Courses

On Wednesday the 30^th, the eighth edition of the International Journalism Festival will take place in Perugia. The event has become one of the most important of its kind in Europe, and it will host hundreds of journalists from all over the world.

The IFJ will also be the location of the third edition of the 2014 School of Data Journalism jointly organized by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation. The School will start on the May the 1^st and will see the participation of 25 instructors from world-leading newspapers, universities, and think tanks.

ProPublica just announced the release of two JavaScript libraries. The first one is Landline and will help developers turn GeoJSON data into SVG browser-side maps. The second is built on the previous one and is called Stateline and will facilitate the process of creating US choropleth maps.

Data Stories

Chris Michael from the Guardian Data Blog recently published a short article listing the world’s most resilient cities. Michael extracted data from a study of Grosvenor, a London-based company which measured resilience by assigning a value to cities’ vulnerability to environmental changes and their capacity to face political or economical threats.

British citizens might be interested in the quality of air they breathe everyday. Those who are worried about air pollution should take a look at George Arnett’s interactive choropleth map showing the percentage of deaths caused by particulate air pollution in England.

What’s the role of the world tech giants in politics? Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold tried to explain it in this article on the Washington Post by observing the evolution of Google in its lobbying activities at the White House. Google’s political influence increased enormously since 2002 thus making the company the second largest spender in the US on lobbying practices.

Are conservatives all conservatives in the same way, or is there a certain degree of moderation among them and toward different issues? On his newly-born FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver faces the argument by displaying data on the “partisan split” between the two US parties on several main topics.

If you are Catholic, or maybe just curious, you should be very interested in seeing The Visual Agency’s last infographic, which represents through a series of vertical patterns the number, geographical area, and social level of professions of all Catholic saints.

Gustavo Faileros, ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellowship, is about to present to the public InfoAmazonia, a new data journalism site which will be monitoring environmental changes in the southern part of South America using both satellite and on-the-ground data.

In addition, as environmental changes increase, so do the number of deaths of environmental and land defenders. The Global Witness team has just published its latest project, Deadly Environment, a 28-page report containing data and important insights on the rise of this phenomenon which is incredibly expanding year by year, especially in South America.

Data Sources

Michael Corey is a news app developer who was involved in the realization process of the National Public Radio mini-site named Borderland. In this post, he analyses the main features of the geographical digital tools that he used to collect and display data on the US-Mexico border which helped him correctly localizing the fences build by the US government all along the line which separates the two Countries.

The data-driven journalism community is expanding rapidly, especially on Twitter. If you need a useful recap of what has been tweeted and retweeted by data lovers, then the Global Investigative Journalism Network #ddj top ten is what you need.

Code – mutednarayan

Tools, Events, Courses

Don’t miss the opportunity to design on of the page of Knowledge is Beautiful, the next book of David McCandless. The challenge is open until March 24 and is also well rewarded with a prize of a total of five thousand dollars.

Ampp3d, the Trinity Mirror-owned data journalism site, launched its own competition too. Aspiring journalists have to develop a mobile-friendly data visualization which will be published on the Ampp3d website. The winner gets a hundred-pound prize.

R is one of the top choices when it comes to programming languages for data visualization. Here you may find a tutorial from Daniel Waisberg on how to display Google Analytics Data with it.

The New York Times is about to reveal Upshot, its new data-driven website based on politics and economics, which will replace Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. Read some updates here.

Data Stories

This week we would like to start by presenting a series of infographics that are detailed as well as interesting.

The funniest one is surely “Twelve world records you can break during your lunch hour”, posted by ChairOffice on Visual.ly.

Big tech companies mean big business transactions. Watch this interactive explanation from Simplybusiness on the history of the biggest Tech Giants Acquisitions

Among the others mentioned above, we strongly recommend you see Weather Radials, a poster representing all the climate changes occurring in 35 cities in the world last year, which is also a data visualization masterpiece to admire.

For a deeper understanding of visualization, take a moment to read this article written by Dorie Clark on the Forbes website, which reminds us why “Data Visualization is the Future”.

Data Sources

See how tech enterprises and organizations are spreading across Africa in this map on WomenTechAfrica.

The toolkit of a data addict is growing every day, and sometimes you have to choose the right tool for your own project. Here is a short list from Jerry Vermanen of software and programs that can be used for data extraction, filtering, and visualization.