John Snow — nope, not the Game of Thrones character, but a young English doctor — mapped out the homes of victims of the disease cholera in London back in 1854. By doing so, he traced nearly every case to a public water pump in the Soho district, which boosted his theory that cholera is a waterborne disease. But he didn’t receive recognition for his work until long after his death.
Is Raw Data Already Cooked?
People tend to think of data as the raw material of evidence. However, statistician Nick Barrowman presents his argument that the idea of “raw data” can be misleading, because data is always the product of cognitive, cultural and institutional processes that determine what to collect and how to collect it. These intentions, assumptions and choices that amount to a kind of pre-processing in the collection of data thus means that data may not be as perfectly objective as is sometimes imagined.
Visme scoured the web to find the best visualizations on climate change in an attempt to shed light on the often misunderstood phenomenon of global warming. Here are the educational and eye-opening gems they found.
Canada Flying Blind With Data Deficiency?
The BBC tracked and visualized US President Donald Trump’s performance and progress in his two years in office. Among the eight graphics, two show that Trump’s approval rating has barely changed since he was sworn in and the rate of turnover among senior level advisers in his administration is considerably higher compared to those of his predecessors.
The New York Times took a look at the paths that the members of the US House of Representatives took to Congress, including major educational, career and political milestones. It shows a narrow but well-trodden path through prestigious schools, lucrative jobs and local political offices before landing at Capitol Hill.
Good news! BBC News’ visual and data journalism team has open-sourced the tools they use for making production-ready visuals with #rstats and #ggplot. The team’s R cookbook is easily reproducible and you can also modify some settings to suit your own chart. Create your own dumbbell charts, stacked bar charts, histograms and more! They also wrote a blog post to explain their process.
“Journalists, generally comfortable dealing in the economy of words, now appear finally to have thrown aside their fear of math and numbers,” says Simon Rogers, Google News Lab data editor and director of the Data Journalism Awards. He predicts that data journalism will expand in 2019 to become a truly global field of work.
The third European Data and Computational Journalism Conference is now accepting submissions of both academic research-focused and industry-focused talks on the subjects of data journalism and information, data, social and computer sciences. Send in your abstracts and proposals by April 4, 2019.