(Source: curiositycounts)
Lessons learned at news:rewired – noise to signal, held at Thomson Reuters HQ on 27 May
IBM’s Visual Communications Lab created a tool that visualizes who’s writing what at the New York Times.
Via the VCL blog:
You begin by performing a search for a topic of interest. Pick a keyword you’re interested, such as “Tsunami”. This will fetch articles containing that term that were written in the last 30 days and build the visualization from them.The above is the result for our search for “journalism.” The results, as explained by the VCL:
Each bubble represents a single human-created tag describing an article. The size corresponds to the overall frequency that specific tag was used to describe articles about your query by labeling a related article.
When you hover over a tag’s bubble you will see the other tags it was used with. The thickness of that connection will imply how frequently that pairing occurred.
You can play with NYT Writes here.
H/T: Flowing Data.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
Google Fusion Tables allows users to create data visualisations such as maps, charts, graphs and timelines.
. Find some data
If you have not got anything in mind then have a browse onData.gov.uk, a collection of searchable public data.Datasets like:
Those are the most recently published datasets in three categories – so you can see how much potential there is for data to inspire news stories.
- Spend over £25,000 in Kingston Hospital
- Pupil absence in schools in England
- Cancer survival by cancer network
New York City is trying to see it’s future as a data platform, according to this article.
The city has been trying to do that in a number of ways, Sterne told the [Activate] conference, including its Open Data initiative, which has produced more than 350 public data sets developers and services can use, and has helped power the BigApps challenge that awards prizes of up to $40,000 to the winner of a competition for best city-data based app. Winners include Roadify, which allows users to share traffic and parking-related data with others and incorporates data from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the Don’t Eat At app — which sends an alert to users if the restaurant they check into on Foursquare is in danger of being shut down due to health risks.
Some nice examples of how the NY is using social media and open data.
Wannabe Hacks’ foray into data journalism makes the front page of ManyEyes.
It’s clickable and interactive so you can compare specific terms and lines on the graph (try finding out who was more searched online, Will or Kate!) and you can shift- and control-click certain points on the graph to compare and contrast. The axes also change to match what you are searching so instead of comparing two lines lower down where you can’t see the specific axis values, you can see them enlarged and stretched out on a new set of axes.
(Source: wannabehacks.co.uk)
