Finding stories in data. The pursuit of facts in plain sight.
One of the first things you will notice when you begin work at a big, busy, bustling news organisations is process. The many layers, overlaps and intricate weaves. The printing press is an elegant machine made of nuts, bolts and levers. Its processes, boiled down, are quite simple. But they are quite rigid and each … Continue Reading →
Although “data journalism” can encompass infographics, interactives, web apps, FOI, databases and a whole host of other numbering, coding, displaying techniques; the road less travelled-by has certain steps, turns and speed bumps. In that sense, here’s a list of things to tick off if you’re interested in going down the data journalism road: Know the … Continue Reading →
If you have been keeping an eye on my blog you’ll know I scraped Cabinet Office Spending data. Few journalists will look at the mountain of CSVs on government data. Even fewer will code enough to scrape them, although a lot of them want to do this and I believe it will address the … Continue Reading →
Seeing as I like to fly in the face of tradition, I’m going to turn things on it’s head and write a blog post of how I did it before I publish what “it” actually is. That is, I have scraped all the Cabinet Office spending data, cleaned it up and extracted it. But before … Continue Reading →
The Cabinet Office, in a move towards greater transparency, are attempting to publish all their data online. This isn’t really news but I don’t think news organizations are looking at this data so I’m scraping it and seeing what it has to offer. So as an exercise I’m scraping the page where ministerial gifts, hospitality, travel and … Continue Reading →
A recent blogpost by TotalPolitics says: In order to get on top of growing mountains of correspondence and keep on digging through acres of committee and legislative papers MPs are having to take on more staff on a fixed staffing allowance, either paying lower wages or taking people on a volunteer basis. This comes … Continue Reading →
The road to No.10 is paved with advisers, they lead you in, they open doors. Often for themselves. Previous advisers include Alastair Campbell, Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers. Until they’re in the door they generally don’t command the political spotlight. That is, unless they’re on the way out like Andy Coulson. What they do … Continue Reading →
Here’s another tool for the amateur data-miners tool kit. I’m hoping it’ll be a pick axe more so than a stick of dynamite. It’s from Google so I’m hopeful. It’s called Google Refine and was previously known as Google Gridworks. And the blurb sounds promising: “Google Refine is a power tool for cleaning up raw … Continue Reading →