#data roundup

This post was originally published in the School of Data

Photo by Robert Banh

This week we want to use a few lines to talk about tools that you can use in your daily work. The School of Data offers a very useful compilation of online resources including tutorials, books and tools about scraping, data analysis, visualisation, etc.

But if you can’t find what you need, there are more options. Tony Hirst has just published a short post with some links to tools and applications that are useful for visualisations.

For those who want to learn how to manage digital data, there is an online training programme called Mantra that could be very helpful. If you are a ‘maps person’ you might find useful this new tool released by LA Times to convert GIS shapefiles into SVGs.  

But if you are more into statistics don’t miss this FAQ guide about basic data concepts. Are you passionate about code? So visit this compilation of apps used by the National Public Radio.

Inspirational

Sometimes, news about economy are a little bit hard to understand, particularly if they are about big numbers. The Guardian tried to solve this problem using visualisations to explain Autumn statement.

But data is not just about what is happening now. We can use it to understand the future, like David McCandless tries to do it with this infographic about CO2 emissions. But we can also have a look to the past, like this interactive map about London bomb sight during World War II.

And if you are really passionate about a book or a TV show you can also start collecting your own data and make some visualisations like this “statistical look back” at The Walking Dead series or this interactive graph about Game of Thrones (the books).

Good practice

The web is flooded with ‘infographics’ made by PR and marketing agencies that don’t pay much attention to the accuracy of the message.

But, as they have became so popular, many people think they are the original ‘information graphics’. Alberto Cairo is claiming the word infographic back.

If you are really interested in maps, I’m sure you will read this blog post from ProPublica where they explain all the choices and decisions they made to create an interactive map about migrations of african-americans from the countryside to the cities.

This is post was originally published in the School of Data

Photo by Elkit

This week we have big news. The first courses of the School of Data are already available. If you are new on this, have a look to them. You will see that data is not so scary as it seems. We also bring you some tips about how to design and make more functional your data visualisations.

First, you must keep in mind what Naomi Robins wrote in her blog a few months ago and that was recently republished by datadrivenjournalism.net: consider your message when choosing what chart to use.

But it’s not just about selecting the right kind of visualisation, it’s also important to make it look nice. Tony Hirst wrote about this a few days ago, when he saw the ‘chart equivalent of comic sans’.

And if you are a big fan of radar graphs, maybe you should have a look to this post by Alberto Cairo and read why he thinks you should avoid them 99.9% (he just used them twice in his whole career)

Open data

French organisation Regards Citoyens published in the OKFN blog a post about the revision of the Public Sector Information Directive in the European Parliament. Probably it will include some of the demands made by the open data movement, but the French group is asking citizens all around the EU to contact their MEP to make sure that the public sector starts using open formats.

But there are some countries in Europe without a Freedom of Information Act. For example, Spain, where the open data group Tu Derecho a Saber has released a report about transparency. According to their figures, 86% of the times that a citizen ask for information, he or she doesn’t receive a satisfactory answer.

And in the other side of the Atlantic, also in a Spanish-speaking country, they also have the same problem. In Argentina there isn’t a Freedom of Information Act, and from the newspaper La Nación they recommend more activism to make more pressure on the government.

If you want to contribute to the open data movement, the OKFN needs your help. You can make a donation or become a regular supporter.

Inspirational

There are pieces of work that can amaze data supporters and readers in general. Like this map made by LA Times using CartoDB. They show the response time of the fire department in the whole city.

And if you like to use data to analyze everything that your government does, have a look to this to projects made by The Guardian. In the first one they explain with numbers how the British work programme failed and in the second they visualise government spending by department.

But data is not just about ‘hard news’. If you want to relax and play some music, you can also entertain yourself diving into 50 years of concerts of the Rolling Stones. Mapped!

Events

If you are going to be in the United States this week, remember that The New York Times is hosting a HackDay the 8th of December.

This post was originally published on the OKFN School of Data

Photo by chsh/ii

TOOLS, COURSES AND EVENTS

Datawrapper 1.0 is an open source tool to create graphs and charts easily that has just been released. During the last months it has been working as a beta version. It’s designed by Mirko Lorenz and it allows you to create embeddable data visualisations in a very simple way.

The OKFN has created a new chapter in France as a way of relate local initiatives with the international open knowledge community. You can follow the French group on Twitter.

If you are interested in data visualisation, Alberto Cairo is organizing the second edition of a free course called ‘introduction to infographics and data visualisation’, hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas. For the first edition more than 2000 people enrolled in just a few days. This time there will be more vacancies but more than 1100 students joined the course so far.

Next 1st and 2nd of December, 8 Latin American countries will celebrate an international hackathon called ‘Desarrollando América Latina’ (Developing Latin America). The aim of this event is to develop apps to ‘solve cross curricular social problems’ of the region. It will take place in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, México, Perú, and Uruguay.

News:Rewired is a must-go event in the UK. This conference hosted by Journalism.co.uk tackles the most important challenges of digital communication each year, and that includes data.

DATA STORIES

Data can measure (almost) everything, even happiness. The ONS has launched a report about the well-being in the UK and they even designed a wheel to interact with the data.

And even though we don’t know if happiness is just about the money, The Guardian Datablog made the wages map of Britain

Emil Johansson also likes maps, but he prefers the Middle Earth instead of Great Britain. This Swedish student is the author of the Lord of the Rings Project, a data driven work about Tolkien’s universe. It was launched a few months ago, but it has became so successful that his owner had to ask for money to buy a bigger host. He collected more than 700 dollars in just 3 days.

BIG DATA

Earlier this month Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, stated that data should play an important role in government decisions but that there were some coordination problems that prevented this to happen. This week, public sector took a big step towards the use of big data with the announce of a new code of practice to protect privacy in government datasets.