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Links: Session 1A – the data journalism toolkit

Visualisations are the bright flowers of the data journalism world, and behind them are a lot of complex processes that have to take place before they come to life.

Book Your Place!Where should I look? How do I know whether the data is reliable? What format should it be in? How can I search it? These are just some of the hurdles facing journalists before they can start to think about technicolour charts.

One of the first things we decided to cover when planning news:rewired – noise to signal was what went on behind the scenes in transforming an idea into a dataset ready to add colour to.

In this post we’ve collected links to tips and articles relating to all elements of the data journalism toolkit session, which will feature Professor Paul Bradshaw, visiting professor, City University and founder, helpmeinvestigate.com; Kevin Anderson, data journalism trainer and digital strategist; and James Ball, data journalist, Guardian investigations team will discuss the topic, with more speakers to follow.

From Journalism.co.uk

Useful blog posts

Useful resources

  • Data.gov.uk – the government’s online data store. With more than 5,400 datasets available, from all central government departments and a number of other public sector bodies and local authorities, this is a good place to start. See the US version too: Data.gov.
  • Guardian Data Blog – the Guardian’s world leading Data Blog publishes a wide variety of datasets and visualisations from all sorts of projects. See this new guide to the five most important datasets related to the 2011 budget, and the blog’s general guide to world government data.
  • Google Refine – a handy new tool from Google for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases.
  • Get the data – a new site from Rufus Pollock that helps you find data relating to a particular issue and how to cleanse and sort data or get it into a format you can work with.

Buy tickets for news:rewired – noise to signal at this link.

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