IS D3 DE TOEKOMST VAN DE DATAJOURNALISTIEK

Wie nog denkt dat journalistiek niet over cijfers gaat heeft het mis. Cijfers op de redactie zijn belangrijker dan ooit. Sinds we achter de computerschermen zitten en databases geen hogere wiskunde meer zijn, worden er meer data verzameld dan ooit. En die data dienen allemaal voor het uitzetten van beleid en besluitvorming. Dat komt ook tot uitdrukking in de persberichten: het nieuws staat nog net in tekst maar vaak hangen er hele tabellen aan of verwijzingen naar tabellen. Neem bijvoorbeeld een persbericht van de ECB over de daling van het aantal financiele instellingen. (http://www.ecb.eu/press/pr/date/2013/html/pr130121.en.html). Al die data kunnen interessant voor de journalistiek; bijvoorbeeld om het beleid te checken of voor een eigen analyse, vanuit een nieuw gezichtspunt. Bijvoorbeeld de regionale verdeling van werkloosheid zoals de Volkskrant publiceerde (27/12/2012).
Gepubliceerd in De Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/04/is-d3-de-toekomst-van-de-datajournalistiek/
Gepubliceerd in Memeburn: http://memeburn.com/2013/05/why-data-driven-documentation-is-the-future-of-online-journalism/  

FT Legends part 2

Google Fusion Tables finally solved the problem of adding legend to a map. Produce the map you want and choose Change map styles, and then for Legend. You can choose the position of the legend on the map

Raspberry Pi

                               Running Raspberry Pi in a virtualbox.

Twitter Journalism: Lessons from #OscarPistorius

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It was an exciting Valentine's day this year. On Febr 14, in the early morning, the news that Oscar Pistorius had killed is girl friend Reeva Steenkamp hit Twitter. The social media newswire exploded again when Pistorius had to appear in the Magistrate's Court in Pretoria, because TV and photographs were not allowed during the bail hearings.

What can journalism learn from this mayor news event on Twitter?
The complete story is published on De Nieuwe Reporter: http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/2013/03/twitter-geeft-de-individualisering-van-de-journalistiek-een-zetje/ 

Legend in FT maps

Google Fusion Tables is a great tool to visualize data on a map. But there is no legend to the map. Of course you can mouse over the map and get the data for a point or polygon. A legend explaining to the reader what is shown would be better.

Data Journalism Tricks

Scrapping data from the web is not easy. Google spreadsheets in Google drive are a great help. Here are some tricks.

Importing a table
Let's start easy. I was doing some research about Dutch municipalities and their mayors. Question was: Is the distribution of political parties over the mayors resembling the distribution in the parliament? So you need a list mayors and their party. Wikipedia is an option and works fine as example. Here is the page: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_huidige_burgemeesters_in_Nederland . Now there are several possibilities to get this in a spreadsheet: copy/paste or using OutWit Hub. Directly importing it in Google spreadsheets goes like this. Open a new spreadsheet and type in the first cell:

=ImportHtml("http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_huidige_burgemeesters_in_Nederland","table",2)

Some tech things

Browsing on the Internet is serendipity. You don't find what you are looking for but something different and interesting shows up. Here are a few:

Android

Of course I want to run Linux on my Samsung. But can also do it the other way: running Android 4.1 in a Virtual Box in Linux. Here is the recipe: http://www.keyables.com/2012/10/run-android-411-jelly-bean-on-virtualbox.html . I used the android file for tablet with Google apps. Simple, just import the file as appliance in Virtual Box. Of course we run Android as root as you can see from the snapshot

If you don't like the Virtual Box and want to run Android directly on your machine. No problem, just download the Jelly Bean .iso and install on an USB drive and boor from the drive. Here is an other recipe: http://www.keyables.com/2013/01/how-to-run-android-x86-jelly-bean-iso.html. You want to try an other Android .iso. Here is the download page: http://www.android-x86.org/download .