Workshop data

Database Journalism: Finding the smoking gun

Steve DoigArizona State Universitysteve.doig@asu.edu

Why use “data”?

Precision journalism

What is “data”?

Information -- but not data Steve Doig is a 65-year-old

professor who teaches at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

Now it’s data!

Last name

First name

Age Title City

DoigSteve 65

Professor Phoenix

Jones Bob 45 Editor Sydney

Smith Tom 34 Reporter Melbourne

Getting data WOBBING.EU

Wet Openbaarheid van Bestuur (Open Government Act)

ISTAT.IT Request from agencies Build your own?

History lesson

Recent “big data” stories Education cheating (USA

Today) UK MPs’ spending (Guardian) Medicare fraud (CalWatch) EU fishing subsidies (ICIJ)

More examples Budgets and taxes Crime patterns School test scores Auto accidents Demographic change Pet licenses Air quality Sports statistics

Data journalism tools Analysis:

Spreadsheet (Excel)

Database (Access) Mapping (ArcMap) SPSS, SAS Text editor Social network

analysis (NodeXL)

Presentation: Google fusion

tables Ruby, Django,

perl, python, et al.

Photoshop

Patterns and outliers

Data power tool: MS Excel

A blank spreadsheet

What Excel can do Import data from many formats Sort data by one or more variables Filter data to show only selected

rows Transform data using functions

and formulas Summarize data into categories

Importing data Common formats

*.xls (or *.xlsx) Fixed-width text Delimited text (comma, tab, etc) *.dbf files (old dBase) HTML tables

Data Import Wizard will help

Delimited text example

Sorting a table

Now it’s sorted

Filtering: Data…Filter…Autofilter

Pick a category…

…and see just that

Transforming data Math functions

Add, subtract, multiply, divide Average, median, maximum, minimum

Date/Time functions Day of week, days between

Text functions Extract parts of text strings Search and replace text

Function Wizard (ƒx)

Function Wizard (ƒx)

Summarizing data

Example data

Pivot table example Data: Region, province, population,

murders, etc. Question: “How many murders

occurred in each region?” Visualize the piece of paper that

would answer the question

Building a pivot table

Pivot table

Sorted pivot table

Data journalism resources

DataJournalismHandbook.org

Publications

DOMANDE?