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Data Roundup, 19 February

- February 19, 2014 in Data Roundup

Joriel “Joz” Jimenez – Lego Castle Advent Calendar

Tools, Events, Courses

Every data addict knows that each file containing numbers in rows and columns must be filtered and cleaned first. The Data Cleanser help you doing it by rapidly removing duplicates. Try it here.

The Partnership for Open Data officially launched the Impact Stories Competition. Submit a story on how open data has positively changed the community you live in and get the chance to win 1000 dollars.

Data Stories

The Guardian Data Blog ranked the biggest cities in the world according to their cost of living and to the average price paid for a 1kg loaf of bread. Read more about how the economy is changing in countries’ capitals here.

Matthew C. Klein works for the Bloomberg View and recently succeeded in transforming complex financial and economic data into a story told through a series of attractive visualizations. How We Spend is the title of the project, and it absolutely deserves to be seen.

As I am a fan of curious infographics, here is one on the saying Practice Makes Perfect from Daily Infographic.

Shane O’Neill from InformationWeek interviewed Phil Simon, technology expert and author of the book ‘The Visual Organization’ where he discusses the importance of turning data into visualizations. Take a look at it here.

If you are passionate about history and you live in Washington D.C., here is an interesting article from the Washington Post on D.C. historic houses you might want to see.

Young or aspiring data journalists may take inspiration from this (very short) interview with Duarte Romero Varela, a graduate student from Birmingham University who talks about his first impressions of working for Infogr8.

Have you ever seen conditional probability visualized? No? Well, now you can admire this beautiful visual explanation of it made by Victor Powell for Setosa.

The Economist published an interesting short article showing when and how Lego became one of the leading toy brands in the world. Read about its expansion in ‘Empire Building’.

Data Sources

Dyanna Gregory and Trina Chiasson from Infoactive are leading a wonderful project called Data Made Simple aimed at realizing a free e-book on the fundamentals of data visualization. Help them here by filling a short survey.

Pie charts are probably the most hated way to represent data. If you tired of them and you are looking for good alternatives Helpmeviz explain here how to avoid and replace them with better graphs.

Credits

Thanks to @EdRamthun and @stelldirvornet!

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The World Tweets Nelson Mandela’s Death

- December 10, 2013 in Data Stories, Mapping, Storytelling, Visualisation

The World Tweets Nelson Mandela’s DeathClick here to see the interactive version of the map above 

Data visualization is awesome! However, it conveys its goal when it tells a story. This weekend, Mandela’s death dominated the Twitter world and hashtags mentioning Mandela were trending worldwide. I decided to design a map that would show how people around the world tweeted the death of Nelson Mandela. First, I started collecting tweets associated with #RIPNelsonMandela using ScraperWiki. I collected approximately 250,000 tweets during the death day of Mandela. You can check this great recipe at school of data blog on how to extract and refine tweets.

scraperwiki

After the step above, I refined the collected tweets and uploaded the data into CartoDB. It is one of my favorite open source mapping tools and I will make sure to write a CartoDB tutorial in future posts. I used the Bubble or proportional symbol map which is usually better for displaying raw data. Different areas had different tweeting rates and this reflected how different countries reacted. Countries like South Africa, UK, Spain, and Indonesia had higher tweeting rates. The diameter of the circles represents the number of retweets. With respect to colors, the darker they appeared, the higher the intensity of tweets is.

That’s not the whole story! Basically, it is easy to notice that some areas have high tweeting rates such as Indonesia and Spain. After researching about this topic, it was quite interesting to know that Mandela had a unique connection with Spain, one forged during two major sporting events. In 2010, Nelson Mandela was present in the stadium when Spain’s international football team won their first ever World Cup Football trophy as well. Moreover, for Indonesians, Mandela has always been a source of joy and pride, especially as he was fond of batik and often wore it, even in his international appearances.

Nonetheless, it was evident that interesting insights can be explored and such data visualizations can help us show the big picture. It also highlight events and facts that we are not aware of in the traditional context.

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Learning Lunches

- November 28, 2013 in

Laptop lunch

Photo credit: Rachel Andrew

Noah Veltman, OpenNews Fellow at the BBC, wrote a series of Learning Lunches and generously allowed School of Data to republish them.

These Learning Lunches are series of tutorials that aim to bridge the context gap and to demystify technical topics that come up often in newsroom development. They are a high-level but concrete discussion of technologies intended to foster more productive collaboration among developers, journalists, and designers. They involve as little code as possible but provide ample guidance for those who want to learn more.

Data Roundup, August 7

- August 7, 2013 in Data Roundup

Data doesn’t go on holiday, but data people do. Still interesting things have been happening around the world. Visualisation tips, how to stop bus crowding and some juicy new datasets from New York City. Read the rest of this entry →

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