marianne bouchart – telling stories with data

Data StorytellingHow do you start, get data and sort it?

By Marianne Bouchart

@Maid_Marianne @GENinnovate

mbouchart@globaleditorsnetwork.org1

Introduction

Journalists have to acquire new skills to keep up with the amount of information

now available online.

Being able to work with large datasets is one of them.

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First: How do I start?

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First: How do I start?

With a question!

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Ok, I have my questions, now where do I find data?

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DataPortals.org

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FindTheData.com

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EU Data Portal

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European Union Open Data Portal

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Data.gov.uk

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Data.gov

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Open Corporates

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Wikileaks website

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The World Bank

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The UN Data Portal

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The UNHCR Data Portal

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The World Health Organization Data

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Google Public Data Explorer

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GetTheData.org

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Quora

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Crowdsourcing using Google Forms

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WhatDoTheyKnow.com

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Find datasets directly on Google

Google search operators:

- filetype:CSV and filetype:XLS for Excel spreadsheets

- filetype:shp for geo data

- filetype:MDB, filetype:SQL, filetype:DB for database extracts

- if you’re so inclined, you can even look for filetype:pdf

- ‘inurl:downloads filetype:xls

- site:agency.gov

example:

site:adidas-group.com filetype:pdf

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Data Scraping with Google

One line magic formula in Google Spreadsheet to scrape data from HTML tables:

=importHTML(“”,”table”,N)

example:

=ImportHtml(“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_Kingdom_settlements_by_population”, ”table”, 1)

result:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fPu-3wNjVnyB_zF9x72u6X811exIQVxYzaUtdMxderk/edit#gid=0&vpid=A1

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Now Clean Your Data

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Open Refine

Using Open Refine by Ruben Verborgh, Max De Wilde can be found here

DataDrivenJournalism.net tutorial for Google Refine can be found here27

Interrogate data with spreadsheets

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Berkeley’s tutorial on Spreadsheets

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CIJ’s Data Journalism handbook

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The Data Journalism Awards submission opens December 17th

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@Maid_Marianne @GENinnovate

mbouchart@globaleditorsnetwork.org

Thank You!

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