Institute for Analytic Journalism

"The Devil is in the Digits"? No, I'd say they abound in the comments.

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-22T19:05:11-06:00

An intriguing op-ed in The Washington Post on Saturday (June 20, 2009) claimed to spot fraud in the Iran elections by applying some analytic methods basically drawn from Benford's Law. Yes, read the article, but be sure to drill down into the 140+ comments. Most quite cogent and well argued.

The Devil Is in the Digits
Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopu...By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco

Teaching Spatial Thinking

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-22T16:40:16-06:00

Discovered a new, online resource for teaching spatial thinking today while attending the UCGIS Summer Assembly here in Santa Fe. Take a lookat teachspatial.org:

About TeachSpatial

TeachSpatial.org implements suggestions from a multi-disciplinary Symposium on a Curriculum for Spatial Thinking. The symposium, organized by Diana Sinton, Mike Goodchild, and Don Janelle, was hosted by the University of Redlands in June 2008. Its purpose was to discuss the merits and content of a general curriculum course on spatial thinking. One of its recommendations was to establish a wiki site to promote the discussion and sharing of resources among instructors.

Participants in the Redlands meeting were Kate Beard-Tisdale (Spatial Information Science Engineering, Maine), Marcia Castro (Global Health and Population, Harvard), Jeremy Crampton (Geosciences, Georgia State), Phil Gersmehl, Geography, CUNY Hunter), Mike Goodchild and Don Janelle (spatial@ucsb), John Kantner (School of Advanced Field Studies, Santa Fe), Steve Marshak (Geology, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jo-Beth Mertens (Economics, Hobart and William Smith), and Diana Sinton (Spatial Curriculum, Redlands).

What you can do here

Create an account and contribute. Account setup is automated and fast and your email address is kept private.
Once logged in, you can subscribe to content types (blogs, links, discussions, etc.) to get emails announcing new postings -- do this from your My Account page
From the "Create Content" page you can post:
- schemas (e.g., models and representations) to help link concepts into broader frameworks of spatial reasoning
- teaching resources (syllabi, lesson plans, exercises, examples of student work, etc.)
- links of interest to this community

Some nifty Unemployment Charts from Jorge Camoes

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-19T15:45:20-06:00

Jorge Camoes is one of the serious folks when it comes to dataviz. Here's some work he's done recently in U.S. unemployment data. Note especially the good state-by-state dashboard. It quickly shows New Mexico is hangin' in there.

Charts: Monthly Unemployment Rates by State 1976-2009

by Jorge Camoes on June 18, 2009

Here are two ways to display a relatively large dataset, montly unemployment rates by state since 1976. The first one is perfect to see the overall patterns, the range from the lowest to the highest, the outliers and the slopes. An interactive version would allow the user to highlight specific series.

A small-multiple version allows the user to focus on specific states, compare them to the normal band, etc. States are ranked by labor force size and, as you can see, in the first row seven out of ten are above the US average in April. In the last row, only one is above the US average. You can also see that Michigan was not well (unemployment-wire) long before the current crisis, or a spike in Luisiana (Katrina). It pays to study this chart carefully.

Bottom line: try to see the same data from different angles. There will always be semething interesting to find.

What do you think? How would you improve these charts? Would you use a different display? Share it in the comments! (here is the data file)

Update: I usually stay away from Excel’s surface charts, but I’d like to add this one:

Also check Michael’s Horizon chart.

From products to services, services to products

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-11T10:24:27-06:00

Interesting discussion of, fundamentally, how the Digital Revolution drives the flow from products to services and services to products. Ergo, touches on much of what is at the core of SFComplex. See.... The New Negroponte Switch -- "Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things". Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the "Web Meets World" change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.

The JavaScript InfoVis

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-06T14:10:35-06:00

An interesting beginning for a potentially valuable and interesting tool....

"Javascript Infoviz Toolkit -- Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via O'Reilly Radar and chrisblizzard on Twitter)

Features

Multiple Data Representations
Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more...
Major Browsers Support
IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+
Open Source
Licensed under the BSD License
Library Agnostic
You may use the JIT with your favorite DOM manipulation framework
Extensible
All visualization classes are mutable, so you can easily add/override any method you want.
Composable
Visualizations can be combined in order to create new visualization methods."

Rise of the Data Scientist

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-04T09:14:32-06:00

Nathan, the chap who curates the valuable blog Flowing Data, offers up a bit of hope for journalists who are worried about their employment futures and yet have invested in learning methods of data analysis. When thinking about re-inventing ourselves, consider the phrase "data scientist."

Rise of the Data Scientist

Posted by Nathan / Jun 4, 2009 to Data Design Tips, Statistics / 6 comments

Photo by majamarko

As we've all read by now, Google's chief economist Hal Varian commented in January that the next sexy job in the next 10 years would be statisticians. Obviously, I whole-heartedly ...

Good Magazine Inforgraphics archive

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-03T14:19:01-06:00

Good magazine often produces informative and innovative infographics. Eighty of those works are now on Flickr. Be sure to drill down into the thumbnails to see the work in detail. Go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodmagazine/sets/72157618896371005/

GOOD Magazine · Sets

Slideshow

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GOOD Transparencies Archive

Thumbnails Detail 2 comments

An archive of Transparencies that have run in past issues of GOOD and on our blog.

We post a new Transparency every Tuesday on www.good.is/

80 photos | 43,395 views

items are from between 04 Apr 2008 & 02 Jun 2009.

New levels of data aggregation

analyticjournalism — 2009-06-02T11:37:35-06:00

We've been noticing since the first of the year the results of some very creative and sometime brilliant aggregation sites. (Do we need a new phrase for this format?) These sites are richer than Google mash-ups in that they allow far more control by the user. Some, like Mint.com or TripIt.com, also require various degrees of data entry by the user, sometimes with with a surprising degree of detail, both personal and specific. Mapumental, below, pushes the limits of this evolution.

mySociety blog » Say hello to Mapumental

By Tom Steinberg on Monday, June 1st, 2009

We’ve been hinting for a while about a secret project that we’re working on, and today I’m pleased to be able to take the wraps off Mapumental. It’s currently in Private Beta but invites are starting to flow out.

Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time - to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.

In its first iteration it’s specially tuned to help you work out where else you might live if you want an easy commute to work.

Francis Irving, the genius who made it all work, will post on the immense technical challenge overcome, soon. My thanks go massively to him; to Stamen, for their lovely UI, and to Matthew, for being brilliant as always.

Words don’t really do Mapumental justice, so please just watch the video :) Update: Now available here in HD too

Also new: We’ve just set up a TheyWorkForYou Patrons pledge to help support the growth and improvement of that site. I can neither confirm nor deny that pledgees might get invites more quickly than otherwise ;)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:20am and is filed under Launches, News, Travel Time Maps. Follow responses to this entry (RSS2 feed).

Amazon Hosts TIGER Mapping Data

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-30T11:06:38-06:00

From O'Reilly Radar....

Amazon Hosts TIGER Mapping Data

Posted: 29 May 2009 09:18 AM PDT

Last week at Ignite Where Eric Gundersen of Development Seed made a significant announcement for geohackers looking for easy access to open geodata. Amazon will be hosting a copy of TIGER data on EC2 as an EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Eric stated that this happened during the Apps For America contest in 2008 when they need open geo data for their entry Stumble Safely (which maps crime against bars).

Amazon is now hosting allUnited States TIGER Census data in its cloud. We just finished moving 140 gigs of shapefiles of U.S. states, counties, districts, parcels, military areas, and more over to Amazon. This means that you can now load all of this data directly onto one of Amazon’s virtual machines, use the power of the cloud to work with these large data sets, generate output that you can then save on Amazon’s storage, and even use Amazon’s cloud to distribute what you make.

Let me explain how this works. The TIGER data is available as an EBS storeEBS, or Elastic Block Storage, which is essentially a virtual hard drive. Unlike S3, there isn’t a separate API for EBS stores and there are no special limitations. Instead an EBS store appears just like an external hard drive when it’s mounted to an EC2 instance, which is a virtual machine at Amazon. You can hook up this public virtual disk to your virtual machine and work with the data as if it’s local to your virtual machine – it’s that fast.

The TIGER Data is one of the first Public Data Sets to be moved off of S3 and switched to an EBS. By running as an EBS users can mount the EC2 instance as a drive and easily run their processes (like rendering tiles with Mapnik) with the data remotely. If you're a geo-hacker this makes a rich set of Geo data readily available to you without consuming your own storage resources or dealing with the normally slow download process.

I love the idea of Amazon's Public Data Sets. It's an obvious win-win scenario. The public is able to get access to rich data stores at a relatively cheap price and Amazon is able to lure said public onto their service. Smart.

Where '09: Jack Dangermond, "Realizing Spatial Intelligence on the GeoWeb"

analyticjournalism — 2009-05-26T20:26:13-06:00

"Where 09" is a fine conference put on by O'Reilly Publishing. At this year's conference, Jack Dangermond, honcho at ESRI, talked about "Realizing Spatial Intelligence on the GeoWeb." Take note of how he and a colleague use a command in Google Maps - “Greeley: mapservers” -- to call up a bunch of map servers and their files for, in this case, Greeley, Colo.

That's a neat search tool that may give you quite mixed results depending on how GIS hip your local governments are. It seems to work for many non-U.S. cities, too. For example, "Amsterdam: mapserver" returned good results, but nothing for Mexico City or Berlin. Still, we think the search tool. while young, has a lot of promise, especially if you can find the time to drill down into the metadata for individual maps.

For the Dangermond presentation (15 min) go to: http://where.blip.tv/file/2151502/