Top 10 Things for getting Started in Data Journalism

Although “data journalism” can encompass infographics, interactives, web apps, FOI, databases and a whole host of other numbering, coding, displaying techniques; the road less travelled-by has certain steps, turns and speed bumps. In that sense, here’s a list of things to tick off if you’re interested in going down the data journalism road: Know the [...]

Visualization – A Cloud of Spending

  If you have been keeping an eye on my blog you’ll know I scraped Cabinet Office Spending data. Few journalists will look at the mountain of CSVs on government data. Even fewer will code enough to scrape them, although a lot of them want to do this and I believe it will address the [...]

Cabinet Office Spending Data Liberated

Seeing as I like to fly in the face of tradition, I’m going to turn things on it’s head and write a blog post of how I did it before I publish what “it” actually is. That is, I have scraped all the Cabinet Office spending data, cleaned it up and extracted it. But before [...]

Small Society

The Cabinet Office, in a move towards greater transparency, are attempting to publish all their data online. This isn’t really news but I don’t think news organizations are looking at this data so I’m scraping it and seeing what it has to offer. So as an exercise I’m scraping the page where ministerial gifts, hospitality, travel and [...]

The Best Things in Life are Free

A recent blogpost by TotalPolitics says:   In order to get on top of growing mountains of correspondence and keep on digging through acres of committee and legislative papers MPs are having to take on more staff on a fixed staffing allowance, either paying lower wages or taking people on a volunteer basis. This comes [...]

Special Treatment for Special Advisers in No. 10

The road to No.10 is paved with advisers, they lead you in, they open doors. Often for themselves. Previous advisers include Alastair Campbell, Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers. Until they’re in the door they generally don’t command the political spotlight. That is, unless they’re on the way out like Andy Coulson. What they do [...]

Google Refine: Will it refine my dire coding skills?

Here’s another tool for the amateur data-miners tool kit. I’m hoping it’ll be a pick axe more so than a stick of dynamite. It’s from Google so I’m hopeful. It’s called Google Refine and was previously known as Google Gridworks. And the blurb sounds promising: “Google Refine is a power tool for cleaning up raw [...]