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Essential visualisation resources: Tools for mapping
This is the fourth part of a multi-part series designed to share with readers an inspiring collection of the most important, effective, useful and practical data visualisation resources. The series will cover visualisation tools, resources for sourcing…
Power tools for aspiring data journalists: Funnel Plots in R
In the following post Tony Hirst describes a quick way of analysing a mortality dataset using R, a very powerful statistical programming environment that should probably be part of your toolkit if you ever want to get round to doing some serious stats…
The top 10 data-mining links of 2011
Overview is a project to create an open-source document-mining system for investigative journalists and other curious people. We’ve written before about the goals of the project, and we’re developing some new technology, but mostly we’re…
A computational journalism reading list
There is something extraordinarily rich in the intersection of computer science and journalism. It feels like there’s a nascent field in the making, tied to the rise of the internet. The last few years have seen calls for a new class of “programmer…
The Bastards Book of Ruby
The Bastards Book of Ruby is an introduction to programming for non-programmers. The online book focuses on the use of programming for the gathering, organizing, and analyzing of data in all its forms.
Programmer-journalist job openings
A spreadsheet listing over 50 programmer-journalist jobs has been circulating online for some time now. All the jobs require technical skills and range from newsroom developer to interactive designer, multimedia producer and social media editor.
Getting text out of an image-only PDF
In the previous guide, we describe several methods for turning PDFs into data usable for spreadsheets. However, those only handle PDFs that have actual text embedded within them. When a PDF contains just images of text, as they do in scanned documents,…
Turning PDFs to text
Adobe’s Portable Document Format is a great format for digital documents when it’s important to maintain the layout of the original format. However, it’s a document format and not a data format.
Using Google Refine to clean messy data
Google Refine (the program formerly known as Freebase Gridworks) is described by its creators as a “power tool for working with messy data” but could very well be advertised as “remedy for eye fatigue, migraines, depression, and other symptoms of…
Manual on Excel for data journalists
The Centre for Investigative Journalism came out with a handbook this year for journalists who want to master the art of interrogating and questioning numbers competently.
Tableau Public
Tableau Public is a data visualisation tool that enables users to condense complex datasets into simple and easy to read graphs, which allow for better understanding of the datasets.
Where are the bodies buried on the web? Big data for journalists
The following post is the introduction to the free online ebook ‘Where are the bodies buried on the web? Big data for journalists’ published by former Apple engineer Pete Warden in January this year.
10 tools that can help data journalists do better work, be more efficient
It’s hard to be equally good at all of the tasks that fall under data journalism. To make matters worse (or better, really), data journalists are discovering and applying new methods and tools all the time. As a beginning data journalist, you’ll want…
How to scrape Toronto data: a basic tutorial
This post is a step-by-step tutorial on scraping for beginners with video clips.
Visualizing Toronto’s water usage: a tutorial
This post is a tutorial on data visualisation for those who are just starting out. You will learn how to take a big data file, clean it, filter it and turn it into a visualisation.
List of tutorials for journalists on how to use spreadsheets
This post is a list of the best free tutorials on the web for journalists who want to learn spreadsheet skills.
Video archive EJC @PICNIC11: From database cities to urban stories (II)
In this post you can find the videos of the talks from the second European Journalism Centre session: ‘From database cities to urban stories: What are the success stories?’, at the 2011 edition of the leading media festival PICNIC in Amsterdam.
How to Find Stories in EU Spending Data
Caelainn Barr, EU data journalist, talks about how to find stories in EU spending data at the EJC/OKF data driven journalism workshop in Utrecht in September.
Video archive EJC @PICNIC11: From database cities to urban stories (I)
In this post you can find the videos of the talks from the first European Journalism Centre session: ‘Using technology to run our cities: promises and perils’, at the 2011 edition of the leading media festival PICNIC.
BuzzData
There’s a buzz going around about the new data-sharing hub. BuzzData, the new social network for open source data.
Google Public Data Explorer
Released in August 2010, Google’s Public Data Explorer makes public data and statistics easier to understand and share.
