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TechFugees conference hits London

Today is the day of the TechFugees conference in London, an exciting, absolutely free and nonprofit event organised by TechCrunch editor-at-large Mike Butcher to find technology solutions to the refugee crisis.

01102015-TechFugees1

 

“Moved by the plight of refugees in Europe, a number of technology industry people have formed a small voluntary team to create the free, non-profit, “Techfugees” conference and hackathon.” — Mike Butcher

In just a few weeks, the Techfugees Facebook Group and Twitter account have exploded. Over 700 people from the tech community signed up to the event proving there is clearly a huge desire amongst the tech community to get involved.
Tech engineers, entrepreneurs and startups together with NGOs and other agencies will gather at SkillsMatter HQ in London to address the crisis in ways where the technology world can bring its considerable firepower.
Hei-Da and the Data Journalism Blog support this event and I will be talking at the conference about our initiative, how data journalism has been used to cover the refugee crisis, what challenges news organisations face to get data on the crisis and what technology solutions there could be to facilitate data gathering, publishing and storytelling on the ground.
Andrew Rininsland, senior developer at The Times and Sunday Times, also contributor of the DJB, will also tell us about his experience of the Techfugees Hackathon happening on Friday, October 2nd in London (tickets still available here).
marianne-bouchart
Marianne is the founder and director of Hei-Da.org, a not-for-profit organisation based in London, UK, that specialises in open data driven projects and innovative storytelling. She also created the Data Journalism Blog back in 2011 and used to work as the Web Producer EMEA, Graphics and Data Journalism Editor for Bloomberg News.
Passionate about innovative story telling, she teaches data journalism at the University of Westminster and University of the Arts, London.
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Imminent Relaunch

 

Hint hint… Do I hear a relaunch is in the works?.. Yes Indeed. A new, fresher, bolder and savvier DJB will go live soon alongside exciting new projects.  We thought it was about time to redecorate the place and give it a good upgrade.

The support we’ve had since the launch of the DJB in 2011 has been phenomenal. Even at times when new content wasn’t published frequently, the number of visitors and followers kept on growing. 2015 is a great and exciting year for journalism and the thirst for innovation in the newsroom has never been greater. So we’ve seriously thought about things and decided it was time to take action and relaunch the Data Journalism Blog. 

The new DJB will be bolder, savvier, smarter, and packed with new reviews, how-to guides and interviews about data journalism and innovative story telling for the web. We have exciting projects coming up, including our own compelling data journalism content and collaborations.

The great relaunch will happen in the next few weeks and we look forward to tell you more about it soon, but in the meantime here is a glimpse at our brand new logo…

DJB-Logo-2015-short

[Watch this space]

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Handing over the DJB to the new generation of data journalists [Letter from the Editor]

 

Since its launch in April 2011, the Data Journalism Blog has come a long way. Started as a postgraduate project from City University, London, it is now considered as a reference for data journalism news and is read by journalists, designers and other data enthusiasts from over 58 countries.

As the founder and editor of the DJB, I got to meet incredible people in the world of journalism and to participate to compelling projects such as the Data Journalism Handbook. This website has been a great way for me to share my passion for data journalism with others and to set up an independent platform dedicated to the skills needed to work with data in the newsrooms.

Among the great opportunities that the Data Journalism Blog generated for me was the chance to work for Bloomberg News, one of the biggest media organisations in the world, as their new Web Producer for the EMEA zone. My role involves, among other tasks, working on interactive data visualisations for their websites Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com.

I am delighted to be joining their team and my work at Bloomberg will be one of the most exciting. But it will also be very time-consuming and rather impossible for me to keep up with this blog and develop it to its full potential. I’m therefore a bit sad and weirdly emotional to say goodbye to the DJB today.

But instead of letting this platform die out of my lack of attention, I decided to hand it over to the next generation of data journalists! I met with postgraduates in Interactive Journalism at City University in London and agreed to give them control over the future content of this website. Being a City alumni myself, I understand how important it is to have a platform where your work can be appreciated and I hope the DJB will give just that to this group of aspiring data journalists.

From now on, the very talented John Burn Murdoch and Neha-Tamara Patel, who both write for the Guardian on a regular basis, will be in charge of publishing new content on the website and developing the DJB community further with help from their classmates at City.

The Data Journalism Blog is now set for a life of its own and I can only thank again John and Neha as well as their course leader Jonathan Hewett for taking on the challenge. I’d also like to thank the readers for their support and the many journalists, editors, programmers and other data geeks for their help throughout this journey.

John and Neha will tell you a bit more about the future of the DJB in this introductory post…

I hope to meet many of you again in the future, until then, Aurevoir…

Marianne Bouchart

Founder of the Data Journalism Blog

email: marianne_bouchart@mac.om

 

 

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Data Journalism Blog editor shortlisted for the XCity Award 2012

 

The XCity Award was set up in 2011 to mark the 25th anniversary of XCity magazine, a publication made by postgraduate students in Magazine Journalism from City University, London. It aims at recognising “outstanding contributions to journalism made in the past year by alumni.”

Simon Rogers, editor of The Guardian’s Data Blog won the inaugural prize last year and one of this year’s shortlisted alumni is…well, myself! (Data Journalism Blog editor Marianne Bouchart)

I had a lovely chat with Natasha Wynarczyk about my work for the Data Journalism Blog and a profile was published on the XCity website today. Other nominees include Wannabe Hacks founder Ben Whitelaw and Ramita Navai, who reported on human rights abuses in Syria. Compelling stories about the six nominees as well as further information on the award can be found on their website.

Here is the link to my story and let’s keep our fingers crossed until 22 March when the winner of the £500 prize will be announced on their website.

 

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@pandaproject, a newsroom data app that provides a place to store, search and share data

 

KNIGHT FOUNDATION BLOG

[vimeo 31888260]

 

Brian Boyer, news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, describes PANDA in a video by Jon Vidar.

Earlier this month PANDA, which helps news organizations better use public information by creating new software that cleans up and helps analyze it, went beta.

Users can now test PANDA Project Alpha and give feedback on how it’s doing.

Above, Brian Boyer describes the project’s latest developments.

Boyer is news applications editor at the Chicago Tribune, where he was the 2010 employee of the year. [Read more…]

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Manual on Excel for data journalists

 

DATA DRIVEN JOURNALISM 

 

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. Being able to work with figures and investigate numbers is not a new form of journalism but a skill that all journalists can acquire.

The handbook, entitled Data Journalism or Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR), focuses on an essential tool in a data journalist’s tool belt, the spread sheet. [Read more…]

 

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Data Journalism Awards: setting standards in the field of computer-assisted reporting

 

The International Data Journalism Award competition was launched last week. It is the first ever contest to recognise  outstanding work in the growing field of data journalism worldwide.

Organised by the Global Editors Network (GEN) in collaboration with Google and the European Journalism Centre, the Data Journalism Awards aimed at “setting standards and highlighting the best practices in data journalism.”

“We’d like to enhance collaboration between journalists, developers and designers,” Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO of GEN, announced at a press conference in London last week.

“But we also want to inspire people in the newsrooms by showcasing outstanding data journalism work,” he said.

A jury of data journalism experts and editors from all over the world will grant a total of 45,000€ to six winners.

There are three award categories:

– data-driven investigations

– interactive data-visualizations

– data-driven mobile or web applications / services.

Two sub categories will be defined for national and international media organisations and for regional and hyperlocal organisations. “It is very important to us to have that three levels so that students or freelancers don’t have to compete with big organisations,” says Antoine Laurent, DJA Project Manager.

The DJA website is now live and media companies, non-profit organisations, freelancers or individuals have until the 10 April 2012 to submit their application by filling this online form. Only entries published between 11 April 2011 and 10 April 2012 will be considered.

“We are convinced there is a bright future for journalism. At the moment, only a few organisations are working on data. There is a lot of it available online so what are the journalists waiting for? It is a good idea to define standards for data journalism and that’s what these awards set to do,” argued Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO of GEN.

Paul Steiger, CEO of Pro Publica, is the president of the jury for this competition. Other big figures from the world of data journalism such as Aron Pilhofer from the New York Times and Wolfgang Blau from the Zeit Online are also part of the jury.

“So many data journalists are alone in their newsrooms, we are building a network where they can meet,” Wilfried Ruetten, Director of the European Journalism Centre said during last week’s press conference.

The selection process will start in April and the winners will be announced during the 2012 News World Summit in Paris on 30 May 2012. Good luck!

 

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Tool of the week for journalists – Playground, to monitor social media analytics

Tool of the week: Playground, by PeopleBrowsr.

This post was first published on Journalism.co.uk

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts.

How is it of use to journalists? “Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground,” PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains.

Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities.

These features – and many more – let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject.

Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists.

Grill added:

The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community.

You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Jodee Rich, the founder of PeopleBrowsr, gave an inspiring speech at the Strata Summit in September on how a TV ratings system such as Nielsen could soon be replaced by social media data thanks to the advanced online analytics that PeopleBrowsr offers.

 

Playground’s development is based on feedback from its community of users, which has been very responsive. Ideas can be sent to contact[@]peoplebrowsr.com or by tweeting@peoplebrowsr.

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My Year of Data: working data to the extreme?

At the Data Journalism Blog, we admire people who take on a challenge for the sake of open data. This month we found someone who really take the data love to the extreme and decided to collect as much data about himself as humanly possible.

Walking in the steps of Nicholas Feltron, who is famous for publishing yearly reports that visualise his own personal data, US statistician Chris Volinsky started his experiment on 16 November 2011 on his blog “My Year of Data”.

The aim of this project fits very well the approaching new year’s resolutions: Volinsky is using his online platform as a log in his journey to an healthier lifestyle.

Volinsky explains that measuring his behavior on a daily basis would ultimately help change the behavior itself.

A great social experiment then that will try to figure out whether publishing personal data on the open web could influence our daily routine and help us change our bad habits. But a great data project too that promises some good visualisations opportunities!

Volinsky will open source the data, making it public in case anyone else wants to analyze it.

His first post was quite compelling and self-explainatory so we thought we should feature it here and ask your comment on this unusual enterprise…

Me.asured

My name is Chris. I am 40 years old. I am 5’9 1/2″ and weigh 174 pounds. I walked 9,048 steps and have consumed 1,406 calories today (so far).

Why am I telling you all this?  This is my first entry in what (I hope) will be a year long experiment with self-measurement.   I’m calling it My Year of Data.  The plan is to record and publish as much of my “daily data” as I can.  This includes things I do, foods I eat, how I feel, and almost anything else I can think of.   I’ve created the blog to document my experience and progress.

I came up with the idea recently when I realized that right now I am heavier than I have ever been in my life.  Not by alot, mind you.   Roughly, I have gained about 1 pound per year for about the last  15 years.   For those of you who know me, I dont think you would call me overweight.  But if you go to your favorite BMI calculator, and enter in my stats above I have a BMI of 25.3, which officially classifies as overweight.

What I also realized is that in previous attempts to lose weight, I have been most successful when I keep a log of my weight daily.  By knowing that I was going to have a weigh-in every day, it made me conscious – every day – of what I ate, since I did not want a bad measurement the next morning.   Similarly, if I tracked my exercise patterns, it made me want to exercise more.

In other words, for me there is kind of a Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of health.  The fact that I was measuring my behavior would change the behavior itself.

Additionally, the more public I am with my efforts, the more successful they are.  If I declare to my wife on Sunday “I plan to eat really healthy this week!”, then I am more likely to follow through.  The public declaration of an intent makes it harder to blow it off.

So, putting it all together, and I figured I would go to the next logical extreme via a grand experiment.  I plan to collect, analyze, and share as much data about myself as possible, for a one year period.  I will open source the data, making it public in case anyone else wants to analyze it.   I’ll try to set goals and document my progress towards them.  You dont get more public with your goals than putting them on a blog!

Part of the fun for me will be the data (I am a statistician after all).   I’m hoping there will be interesting trends to find and things to learn about myself – and maybe more generally about health. [Read more…]

 

Tell us what you think of this project in the comment section. If you’ve come across a similar experiment, we’d like to hear about it so share along!