Get the latest news on data driven journalism with interviews, reviews and news features
The Guardian is one of the most respected newspaper when it comes to data journalism and data visualizations. Their website has a section dedicated to data where people can enjoy beautiful infographics made by the likes of David McCandless and other data visionaries.
We met with Simon at his Guardian’s desk to talk about the Data Blog and the impact of Wikileaks on journalism. Look out for his tips on good data visualizations!
[vimeo 27072059]
#opendata film
[vimeo 21711338]
This short film by the Open Knowledge Foundation deals with the raise of open government data and can be found on the Open Government Data website. Open data is changing the relationship between citizens and their government. People are now more aware of government’s spending, who is representing them, and the companies that do business with the government. Some say that open data is bringing a global social change, that it is modifying the way society works.Watch this film and tell us what you think…
STANFORD.EU: Geoff McGhee
[vimeo 14777910]
Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays? [Watch the full version with annotations and links on Stanford.eu]
source: Joel Gunter from Journalism.co.uk
The open data movement, with the US and UK governments to the fore, is putting a vast and unprecedented quantity of republishable public data on the web. This information tsunami requires organisation, interpretation and elaboration by the media if anything eye-catching is to be made of it.
Experts gathered at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last week to discuss what journalistic skills are required for data journalism.
Jonathan Gray, community coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke on an open data panel about the usability of data. “The key term in open data is ‘re-use’,” he told Joel Gunter from Journalism.co.uk.
Government data has been available online for years but locked up under an all rights reserved licence or a confusing mixture of different terms and conditions.
The Open Knowledge Foundation finds beneficial ways to apply that data in projects such as Where Does My Money Go which analyses data about UK public spending. “It is about giving people literacy with public information,” Gray said.
The key is allowing a lot more people to understand complex information quickly.
Along with its visualisation and analysis projects, the Open Knowledge Foundation has established opendefinition.org, which provides criteria for openness in relation to data, content and software services, and opendatasearch.org, which is aggregating open data sets from around the world.
“Tools so good that they are invisible. This is what the open data movement needs”, Gray said.
Some of the Google tools that millions use everyday are simple, effective open tools that we turn to without thinking, that are “so good we don’t even know that they are there”, he added.
Countries such as Itlay and France are very enthusiastic about the future of open data. Georgia has launched its own open data portal, opendata.ge.
The US with data.gov, spend £34 million a year maintaining that various open data sites. Others are cheap by comparison, with the UK’s data.gov.uk reportedly costing £250,000 to set up.