Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
David Herzog posts this good tip to the NICAR-L list:
From All Points Blog. Read down into the original posting to see speculation as to why. Perhaps “user mapping fatigue”?
The company “What's New” page says little about why, just that the goodies are gone.
We have discontinued the A9 Instant Reward program, and the A9 Toolbar and personalized services such as history, bookmarks, and diary. To get help uninstalling your A9 Toolbar, visit toolbar.a9.com. We have also discontinued A9 Maps and the A9 Yellow Pages (including BlockView™).
Another unique investigation by The New York Times gets A1 play in this Sunday's edition (1 Oct. 2006) under the hed “Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings.” Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts (who probably did the heavy lifting on the data analysis) took a long-term look at who contributed to the campaigns of Ohio's Supreme Court justices. It ain't a pretty picture if one believes the justices should be above lining their own pockets, whether it's a campaign fund or otherwise.
In any event, there seems to be a clear correlation between contributions — and the sources — and the outcome to too many cases. A sidebar, “Case Studies: West Virginia and Illinois,” would suggest there is much to be harvested by reporters in other states. There is, thankfully, a fine description of how the data for the study was collected and analyzed. See “How Information Was Collected“
There are two accompanying infographics, one (“Ruling on Contributors' Cases” ) is much more informative than the other (“While the Case Is Being Heard, Money Rolls In” ), which is a good, but confusing, attempt to illustrate difficult concepts and relationships.
At the end of the day, though, we are grateful for the investigation, data crunching and stories.
One of the major aspects of the Digital Revolution that has long intrigued us is how it is driving a shift in power away from institutions and people of traditional authortiy to the individual.
A great example of how this is happening was reported in today's (1 Oct. 2006) NYTimes. “A Town’s Architectural Shift, Chronicled Online” was started by Montclair, New Jersey resident Liz George. She is managing editor of Baristanet, a community Web site and forum, added an interactive map to the site to keep a record of teardowns in her town. The NYT reports:
“On Sept. 22, the Web site started a new feature to chart the town’s changing architectural landscape — an interactive map that shows teardowns, homes with historic designations and recent construction.
“'Maybe something like this will give people pause,' said Ms. George, 39, in her office at her gracious 100-year-old home. 'Knowing you’re having your house on the teardown map, knowing it will be part of this trend, I don’t think it has a positive implication.'
'The teardown issue has taken on a sense of urgency here after a developer bought the blue-shuttered Colonial-style house, on North Mountain Avenue, for $870,000 last fall and demolished it this summer with plans to build six town homes. The action led town officials to rezone about 200 lots — including the North Mountain Avenue property — from a designation that allows up to eight units on a single lot to a designation that allows only two. The developer has since dropped his plans and has put the empty lot up for sale.
Of course, a newspaper could have done the same thing, but so far as we know, none has. So the least the industry could do is supply the software apps, and maybe some instruction, to let citizens build their local databases.
We're a bit delayed in learning about this post on PJNet Today (“A Public Journalism Network Weblog by Leonard Witt and Colleagues), but Jan Schaffer's remarks certainly are in line with what the IAJ is learning as we dive into the analysis of last fall's online survey (in five languages) of journalism educators.
Jan Schaffer, director of the J-Lab at the University of Maryland, recently took a few pokes at the way journalism is taught.
Here are the key parts of a just-posted talk she gave at the AEJMC entitled: What's Next for Newspapers and Journalism Education?
I read several newspapers a day now. I read them now first as a citizen, second as an old Type A assigning editor. So often, I find myself unsatisfied with the stories and angry at the coverage.
I worry about the CONVENTIONS of journalism that we are teaching our students. I worry that some of the conventions that were used both to define “news” and to safeguard fairness and balance in journalism are being gamed by media strategists for their own ends. The result is a journalism that is not serving the public well – and that the public doesn't much trust.
She adds:
I think the academy itself needs to create some oxygen for entrepreneurship and innovation in journalism. We need to rethink our RECRUITING. We reward long-time professionals, who often don't have the skills to bridge the new media environment. Indeed, one of Maryland's marquee professors doesn't even do e-mail. When I suggested this year that all professors be required to put their course syllabi online, I was told it was not the kind of thing that the school could require and besides a lot of people wouldn't know how to do it.
We reward long-form storytellers and feature writing, even though a lot of newspapers and even magazines don't run long stories or features. We reward Ph.D.'s when often their research is not very relevant to the future of journalism – and in many cases, in my view, doesn't really add a lot of value to the knowledge base of journalism.
The 2006 Knight-Batten Awards given by J-Lab are out. All are worth looking at, but one caught our eye, one of the “Niche News” awards in the “Notable Entries” category. Clearly, a lot of legwork on the streets of Boston went into this well-designed project. Now the only question is: Who will keep it updated and how?bostonchinatown.org Emerson College Journalism (Boston, MA)
“Quintessential visualization of civic mapping … Tell us more about these people.” -2006 Knight-Batten Advisory Board Judges
Sixteen Emerson journalism graduate students put in a combined 500 hours of original reporting to develop this web chart. The chart displays connections between more than 100 newsmakers, organization leaders and activists in Boston’s Chinatown based on who talks with whom about local news. The map also acts as a directory with personal profiles available to help people connect.
National Public Radio (USA) had a good piece on the air this Sunday morning about Edward Tufte, the infographics guru. The radio piece, “Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5673332) does a good job of explaining, for the ear, information graphics, and we applaude the folks there for taking on a topic that most radio producers/editors would avoid because “there ain't no sound.” Well, yes, but….Also, the NPR web site included a nice film clip of Tufte during a lecture. Be sure to check it out.
Edward Tufte makes a point during a seminar. Graphics Press
An interesting piece in the NYTimes on Sunday, “Finding Tax Revenue Through Aerial Imaging,” highlights yet another industry and example of how public administrators are using GIS, in this case to increase the revenue stream. We think that if journalists are not hip to these tools, then they cannot ask the right questions of the public's administrators.
Once a year, Pictometry flies a Cessna 172 over Philadelphia, taking thousands of black-and-white photographs. The low-altitude shots, unlike satellite images, show buildings at about a 40-degree angle. Pictometry’s computers organize the photos so they can be searched by address. Nearly 200 employees in Mr. Mescolotto’s office have the software on their computers.
Pictometry isn’t the only company offering aerial photos to assessors, but it has won adherents in more than 200 cities and counties, according to Dante Pennacchia, Pictometry’s chief marketing officer. Its competitors include an Israeli company, Ofek International, working with Aerial Cartographics of America, based in Orlando, Fla….”http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/realestate/20nati.html
The annual APDU conference provides a forum for colleagues to discuss data and public policy issues, keep up with new technologies, and provide input into federal, state, and local data activities. In plenary sessions, APDU 2006 attendees will hear from noted speakers on a variety of critical strategic, technical and policy topics.
Communication among data producers, users, and intermediaries is the most effective way to guide the development, expansion, and preservation of data products. In the past year, government data have been important for providing information to the public, informing policy and spurring investment at the local level. Join APDU this year to learn about and discuss issues related to public data.
For session titles, abstracts, and speakers, see the preliminary agenda. Also, don't overlook the opportunities to network with other public data users and statistical agency officials attending.
Conference planning is well underway, but if you have a suggestion for speakers for this year or a topic you would like considered for the future, contact program co-chairs Lisa Neidert or Leonard Gaines by phone or email.
OK, OK. Maybe we've crossed over some line social acceptability, but this is neat addition to the analytic journalist's toolbox. My friend Mike Collins tips us off to:http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=236
Lifehacker, delicious folks! This post generated a ton of great community ideas. Check out our followup post to see some more ideas and to download a spreadsheet with demos. Thanks.
We often are given a chunk of data in Excel that we need to explore. Of course, the first tool you should pull out of your toolbox in cases like this is the trusty PivotTable (it slices, it dices!). But at times we have to dig a little deeper into the toolbox and pull out the in-cell bar chart. Here’s what it looks like.
This picture shows some Major League Baseball data. I’m graphing the number of walks each player has taken. The bar graphs are built using the Excel REPT function which lets you repeat text a certain number of times. REPT looks like this:
=REPT(text,number_of_times)
For instance, REPT(”X”,10) gives you “XXXXXXXXXX”. REPT can also repeat a phrase; REPT(”Oh my goodness! “,3) gives “Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! ” (my daughter’s an Annie fan).
For in-cell bar charts, the trick is to repeat a single bar “|”. When formatted in 8 point Arial font, single bars look like bar graphs. Here’s the formula behind the bars:
What are some practical uses of in-cell bar graphs? For starters, they offer a good way to profile a dataset that has hundreds or thousands of rows. Here’s a picture of in-cell bars compared to a standard excel bar graph for a dataset with about 500 rows. It can be a lot easier to scan the results when they’re in-cell.
Another usage is lightweight dashboards. The report below compares a number of metrics for players using both in-cell bar graphs as well as conditional formatting. The conditional formatting highlights the top 25% of each metric in green and the bottom 25% in red but that is a story for another day.
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