Category Archives: Data Journalism Experiment

Testing visualisation tools on the world’s most endangered species

Posted on March 31, 2011 by

In the Guardian Datastore, I found a spreadsheet outlining the number of endangered species in each country in 2008 and 2009. The document also subdivided the species into groups of mammals, reptiles, birds and so on. Usually, I start data … Continue reading →

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How transparent is the data on OpenCharities?

Posted on March 30, 2011 by

OpenCharities gathers financial data from 319,851 non-profit organisations. However, it’s difficult to draw consistent observations from the data available. Some profiles are incomplete or out-of-date while others include a full financial breakdown. The only figures that are disclosed across the … Continue reading →

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Europe’s arms exports to Libya: what’s the best visualisation to use?

Posted on March 26, 2011 by

The Guardian Datablog recently published data showing Europe’s arms sales to Libya, after the embargo was lifted, between 2005 and 2009. I’ve decided to put three visualisation websites and software to the test: which one will produce the most coherent … Continue reading →

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The Budget 2011 and data journalism

Posted on March 23, 2011 by

The Budget announcement is all about numbers, and lots of them.  This is data that affects everyone in the UK in some form or another.  There is huge potential for good data journalism, so where do you start? Where to … Continue reading →

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Experimenting with Tableau Public

Posted on March 20, 2011 by

Unlike Many Eyes or Wordle, you have to install Tableau Public on your computer. This put me off at first but in the end I dowloaded the software. I was immediately struck by how user-friendly it is – once I … Continue reading →

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Creating heat-maps using Many Eyes

Posted on March 19, 2011 by

I came across an article on the Guardian’s datablog called ‘Antidepressants in England and Wales: a map of GP prescriptions’. The article includes a map of England and Wales – the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) which prescribe the most anti-depressant … Continue reading →

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Building a data set and visualising it – a day in the life of a data journalist

Posted on March 15, 2011 by

So after reading and writing about data journalism, it was time for me to actually immerse myself and become a data journalist (for a day at least). To understand the role properly, I decided to go through the whole process … Continue reading →

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Experimenting with Visualization Tools

Posted on March 15, 2011 by

‘Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything … Continue reading →

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Are data search sites reliable?

Posted on March 8, 2011 by

There is a growing demand that public data should be transparent and accessible. This demand has generated search sites where members can log in and ask other people, institutions and councillors for answers to their questions. I logged into getthedata … Continue reading →

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Hasn’t anyone told them yet?

Posted on February 24, 2011 by

I was reading a shot article in the Metro yesterday morning, and couldn’t finish it. I didn’t know why so I looked at the article as a whole. Then I realised, the article was just FULL of numbers. 35 figures … Continue reading →

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