A list of updates for small data Journalism.
19 Jan 2014 » The reading list grows
The class is over and I’m still taking my slow time to put the full answers to the final. In the meantime, I’ve been updating the list of readings, which is getting close to 200 eclectic articles about data journalism.
Some favorites from recent additions:
- The year of the disappearing websites
- Should the computer teach the student, or vice versa?
- The Chess Master and the Computer
- What Slate learned from trying, and failing, to record every death by gun in America since Newtown.
09 Nov 2013 » Class notes for 10/28, the Final, and free books
In case you missed it, Oct. 28 was the final session for the class and dealt with Killer Visualizations and how to avoid making them.
The take-home final can be found here. And here are the project requirements.
I’ve also been continuing to add to my long-list of suggested readings. Among the latest additions are three books made free:
- Statistics Done Wrong
- Use the Index, Luke, a great guide for database optimization, something you’ll care about when you’re dealing with more than a few paltry million records.
- Time Series Analysis and Its Applications: With R Examples
20 Oct 2013 » Class notes for 10/21 - Visualization
Notes on data visualization, heavily inspired by Edward Tufte. We also go through one more Fusion Tables example for class.
15 Oct 2013 » Published tutorial on data mapping with Fusion Tables
This may be both the longest and most basic tutorial ever published on how to use Google Fusion Tables (and spreadsheets) to create a data visualization.
You can check the end result of the work at this webpage I constructed from Fusion-supplied code.
08 Oct 2013 » Posted a beginner's guide to using S3 for web hosting
During last night’s class, I had trouble getting everyone through the S3-as-a-web-host process. So I published a step-by-step guide to how to post web files to S3. It starts at a very basic level and doesn’t even assume you’ve even signed up for Amazon yet, so there’s not much specifically about web development. But getting up a file of your choosing onto the web is a pretty big step on its own. Check out the guide here.
07 Oct 2013 » Outline for Oct. 7, 2013 class
Tonight’s class will be even more spreadsheet work than last week, except we’ll mix in Google Fusion Tables to see how we can mix and match data from different data sources. Check the notes here.
30 Sep 2013 » Outline for Sept. 30 class
Here are the class notes for the Sept. 30 class tonight. It’s basically an introduction to spreadsheets, but for the purpose of data organization, rather than a focus on just performing sums and averages. We’ll get into using Fusion Tables too and the concept of data-grouping, i.e. summarizing. I was hoping to get more into Fusion Tables and merging them, but I think we can get to that next week.
23 Sep 2013 » Outline for Sept. 23 class
I’ve posted the outline for the first session of the Data Journalism class, Fall 2013, which includes an overview of the different forms that data journalism can take. I’m not sure we’ll actually get through all of this, but hopefully we’ll get through learning how to use the Web inspector.
16 Sep 2013 » More and less
I’m still in the process of writing the detailed guides and tutorials for my data journalism class. But as it’s just one week from starting, I thought I might as well put out sdJ in presentable form, and add things as I complete them. Check out the course page here.
02 Sep 2013 » First Commit
Hello, this is the very first draft of small data Journalism. Check out the Introduction to learn about this book’s approach and philosophy, or, read the About page for more technical details. You can also follow me on Twitter at @dancow or email me at dan@danwin.com if you have any questions.