Search results for: "data journalist"

December 4, 2010

What is a Data Journalist?

Jod ads come and go, so I thought I’d capture the main elements of this one from the BBC:

Data Journalist – Role Purpose and Aims

You will be required to humanize statistics; to make sense of potentially complicated data and present it in a user friendly format.

You will be asked to focus on a range of data-rich subjects relating to long-term projects or high impact daily new stories, in line with Global News editorial priorities. These could include the following: reports on development, global poverty, Afghanistan casualties, internet connectivity around the world, or global recession figures.

Key Knowledge and Experience

You will be a self-starter, brimming with story ideas who is comfortable with statistics and has the expertise to delve beneath the headline figures and explain the fuller picture.
You will have significant journalistic experience gained ideally from working in an international news environment.
The successful candidate should have experience (or at least awareness) of visualising data and visualisation tools.
You should be excited about developing the way that data is interpreted and presented on the web, from heavy number crunching, to dynamic mapping and interactive graphics. You must have demonstrated knowledge of statistics, statistical analysis, with a good understanding of the range and breadth of data sources in the UK and internationally, broad experience with data sources, data mining and have good visual and statistical skills.
You must have a Computer-assisted reporting background or similar, including a good knowledge of the relevant software (including Excel and mapping software).
Experience of producing and developing data driven web content a senior level within time and budget constraints.
A thorough understanding of the BBC World Service’s aims and the part this initiative plays in meeting them.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with ability to present information concisely to a broad audience including journalists and commissioning editors. You should be able to demonstrate the ability to influence, negotiate with and persuade others.
Central to the role is an ability to analyse complicated information and present it to our readers in a way that is visually engaging and easy to understand, using a range of web-based technologies, for which you should have familiarity with database interfaces and web presentation layers, as well as database concepting, content entry and management.
You will be expected to have your own original ideas on how to best apply data driven journalism, either to complement stories when appropriate or to identify potential original stories while interpreting data, researching and investigating them, crunching the data yourself and working with designers and developers on creating content that will engage our audience, and provide them with useful, personalised information.
You will work in a multimedia way, when appropriate, liaising with online but also radio and TV and specialist output producers as required, from a range of language services. You will help lead the development of computer-assisted reporting skills in the wider news specials team.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES

To identify a range of significant statistics and data -driven stories that can be developed and result in finished graphics that can be used across BBC News websites.
To take a lead role in devising compelling ways of telling data-driven stories on the web, working with specials team designers, developers and journalists as required. Also liaising with radio and TV and specialist output producers across World Service as required, providing a joined-up multi-platform proposition for the audience.
To work with senior stakeholders and programme teams and be an internal expert who can interpret and concisely explain the significance of data to others, and related good practice.
Support the College of Journalism – to help devise training sessions in order to spread the knowledge and best practices of data driven journalism
To help inform the future development by FM&T of tools which enable data-driven stories to be told more quickly and effectively on the web.
To keep abreast of developments in data driven journalism, and pursue collaboration with other teams working on the same area, both within the BBC and also with external organisations.
Willingness to work across a range of online production skills in a flexible manner to BBC standards and values.
· Using their own initiative the successful candidate will be required to build relationships with major sources of content (e.g. BBC networks, programmes, external interest groups) and promote opportunities for cross-media production

COMPETENCIES

Editorial Judgement
Makes the right editorial and policy decisions based upon a clear understanding of the BBC’s distinctive news agenda, the requirements of news and current affairs coverage.

Planning & Organising
Is able to think ahead in order to establish an effective and appropriate course of action for self and others. Prioritises and plans activities taking into account all the relevant issues and factors such as deadlines and resources requirements.

Analytical Thinking
Able to simplify complex problems, process projects into component parts, explore and evaluate them systematically.

Creative Thinking
Is able to transform creative ideas/impulses into practical reality. Can look at existing situations and problems in novel ways and come up with creative solutions.

Resilience
Can maintain personal effectiveness by managing own emotions in the face of pressure, set backs or when dealing with provocative situations. Can demonstrate an approach to work that is characterised by commitment, motivation and energy.

Communication
The ability to get one’s message understood clearly by adopting a range of styles, tools and techniques appropriate to the audience and the nature of the information.

Influencing and Persuading
Ability to present sound and well reasoned arguments to convince others. Can draw from a range of strategies to persuade people in a way that results in agreement or behaviour change.

Managing Relationships and Team Working
Able to build and maintain effective working relationships with a range of people. Highly effective team player.

September 13, 2011

Data Journalists Engaging in Co-Innovation…

You may or may not have noticed that the Boundary Commission released their take on proposed parliamentary constituency boundaries today.

They could have released the data – as data – in the form of shape files that can be rendered at the click of a button in things like Google Maps… but they didn’t… [The one thing the Boundary Commission quango forgot to produce: a map] (There are issues with publishing the actual shapefiles, of course. For one thing, the boundaries may yet change – and if the original shapefiles are left hanging around, people may start to draw on these now incorrect sources of data once the boundaries are fixed. But that’s a minor issue…)

Instead, you have to download a series of hefty PDFs, one per region, to get a flavour of the boundary changes. Drawing a direct comparison with the current boundaries is not possible.

The make-up of the actual constituencies appears to based on their member wards, data which is provided in a series of spreadsheets, one per region, each containing several sheets describing the ward makeup of each new constituency for the counties in the corresponding region.

It didn’t take long for the data junkies to get on the case though. From my perspective, the first map I saw was on the Guardian Datastore, reusing work by University of Sheffield academic Alasdair Rae, apparently created using Google Fusion Tables (though I haven’t see a recipe published anywhere? Or a link to the KML file that I saw Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers/@smfrogers tweet about?)

[I knew I should have grabbed a screen shot of the original map…:-(]

It appears that Conrad Quilty-Harper (@coneee) over at the Telegraph then got on the case, and came up with a comparative map drawing on Rae’s work as published on the Datablog, showing the current boundaries compared to the proposed changes, and which ties the maps together so the zoom level and focus are matched across the maps (MPs’ constituencies: boundary changes mapped):

Interestingly, I was alerted to this map by Simon tweeting that he liked the Telegraph map so much, they’d reused the idea (and maybe even the code?) on the Guardian site. Here’s a snapshot of the conversation between these two data journalists over the course of the day (reverse chronological order):

Here’s the handshake…

I absolutely love this… and what’s more, it happened over the course of four or five hours, with a couple of technology/knowledge transfers along the way, as well as evolution in the way both news agencies communicated the information compared to the way the Boundary Commission released it. (If I was evil, I’d try to FOI the Boundary Commission to see how much time, effort and expense went into their communication effort around the proposed changes, and would then try to guesstimate how much the Guardian and Telegraph teams put into it as a comparison…)

At the time of writing (15.30), the BBC have no data driven take on this story…

And out of interest, I also wondered whether Sheffield U had a take…

Maybe not…

PS By the by, the DataDrivenJournalism.net website relaunched today. I’m honoured to be on the editorial board, along with @paulbradshaw @nicolaskb @mirkolorenz @smfrogers and @stiles, and looking forward to seeing how we can start to drive interest, engagement and skills development in, as well as analysis and (re)use of, and commentary on, public open data through the data journalism route…

PPS if you’re into data journalism, you may also be interested in GetTheData.org, a question and answer site in the model of Stack Overflow, with an emphasis on Q&A around how to find, access, and make use of open and public datasets.

October 31, 2011

Power Tools for Aspiring Data Journalists: Funnel Plots in R

Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe a quick way of analysing the data using R, a very powerful statistical programming environment that should probably be part of your toolkit if you ever want to get round to doing some serious stats, and have a go at reproducing the analysis using a bit of judicious websearching and some cut-and-paste action…

R is an open-source, cross-platform environment that allows you to do programming like things with stats, as well as producing a wide range of graphical statistics (stats visualisations) as if by magic. (Which is to say, it can be terrifying to try to get your head round… but once you’ve grasped a few key concepts, it becomes a really powerful tool… At least, that’s what I’m hoping as I struggle to learn how to use it myself!)

I’ve been using R-Studio to work with R, a) because it’s free and works cross-platform, b) it can be run as a service and accessed via the web (though I haven’t tried that yet; the hosted option still hasn’t appeared yet, either…), and c) it offers a structured environment for managing R projects.

So, to get started. Paul describes a dataset posted as an HTML table by Ben Goldacre that is used to generate the dots on this graph:

The lines come from a probabilistic model that helps us see the likely spread of death rates given a particular population size.

If we want to do stats on the data, then we could, as Paul suggests, pull the data into a spreadsheet and then work from there… Or, we could pull it directly into R, at which point all manner of voodoo stats capabilities become available to us.

As with the =importHTML formula in Google spreadsheets, R has a way of scraping data from an HTML table anywhere on the public web:

#First, we need to load in the XML library that contains the scraper function library(XML) #Scrape the table cancerdata=data.frame( readHTMLTable( 'http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/28/bad-science-diy-data-analysis', which=1, header=c('Area','Rate','Population','Number')))

The format is simple: readHTMLTable(url,which=TABLENUMBER) (TABLENUMBER is used to extract the N’th table in the page.) The header part labels the columns (the data pulled in from the HTML table itself contains all sorts of clutter).

We can inspect the data we’ve imported as follows:

#Look at the whole table cancerdata #Look at the column headers names(cancerdata) #Look at the first 10 rows head(cancerdata) #Look at the last 10 rows tail(cancerdata) #What sort of datatype is in the Number column? class(cancerdata$Number)

The last line – class(cancerdata$Number) – identifies the data as type ‘factor’. In order to do stats and plot graphs, we need the Number, Rate and Population columns to contain actual numbers… (Factors organise data according to categories; when the table is loaded in, the data is loaded in as strings of characters; rather than seeing each number as a number, it’s identified as a category.)

#Convert the numerical columns to a numeric datatype cancerdata$Rate=as.numeric(levels(cancerdata$Rate)[as.integer(cancerdata$Rate)]) cancerdata$Population=as.numeric(levels(cancerdata$Population)[as.integer(cancerdata$Population)]) cancerdata$Number=as.numeric(levels(cancerdata$Number)[as.integer(cancerdata$Number)])
#Just check it worked…
class(cancerdata$Number)
head(cancerdata)

We can now plot the data:

#Plot the Number of deaths by the Population plot(Number ~ Population,data=cancerdata)

If we want to, we can add a title:
#Add a title to the plot plot(Number ~ Population,data=cancerdata, main='Bowel Cancer Occurrence by Population')

We can also tweak the axis labels:

plot(Number ~ Population,data=cancerdata, main='Bowel Cancer Occurrence by Population',ylab='Number of deaths')

The plot command is great for generating quick charts. If we want a bit more control over the charts we produce, the ggplot2 library is the way to go. (ggpplot2 isn’t part of the standard R bundle, so you’ll need to install the package yourself if you haven’t already installed it. In RStudio, find the Packages tab, click Install Packages, search for ggplot2 and then install it, along with its dependencies…):

require(ggplot2) ggplot(cancerdata)+geom_point(aes(x=Population,y=Number))+opts(title='Bowel Cancer Data')+ylab('Number of Deaths')

Doing a bit of searching for the “funnel plot” chart type used to display the ata in Goldacre’s article, I came across a post on Cross Validated, the Stack Overflow/Statck Exchange site dedicated to statistics related Q&A: How to draw funnel plot using ggplot2 in R?

The meta-analysis answer seemed to produce the similar chart type, so I had a go at cribbing the code… This is a dangerous thing to do, and I can’t guarantee that the analysis is the same type of analysis as the one Goldacre refers to… but what I’m trying to do is show (quickly) that R provides a very powerful stats analysis environment and could probably do the sort of analysis you want in the hands of someone who knows how to drive it, and also knows what stats methods can be appropriately applied for any given data set…

Anyway – here’s something resembling the Goldacre plot, using the cribbed code which has confidence limits at the 95% and 99.9% levels. Note that I needed to do a couple of things:

1) work out what values to use where! I did this by looking at the ggplot code to see what was plotted. p was on the y-axis and should be used to present the death rate. The data provides this as a rate per 100,000, so we need to divide by 100, 000 to make it a rate in the range 0..1. The x-axis is the population.

#TH: funnel plot code from: #TH: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/5195/how-to-draw-funnel-plot-using-ggplot2-in-r/5210#5210 #TH: Use our cancerdata number=cancerdata$Population #TH: The rate is given as a 'per 100,000' value, so normalise it p=cancerdata$Rate/100000

p.se <- sqrt((p*(1-p)) / (number)) df <- data.frame(p, number, p.se) ## common effect (fixed effect model) p.fem <- weighted.mean(p, 1/p.se^2) ## lower and upper limits for 95% and 99.9% CI, based on FEM estimator #TH: I'm going to alter the spacing of the samples used to generate the curves number.seq <- seq(1000, max(number), 1000) number.ll95 <- p.fem - 1.96 * sqrt((p.fem*(1-p.fem)) / (number.seq)) number.ul95 <- p.fem + 1.96 * sqrt((p.fem*(1-p.fem)) / (number.seq)) number.ll999 <- p.fem - 3.29 * sqrt((p.fem*(1-p.fem)) / (number.seq)) number.ul999 <- p.fem + 3.29 * sqrt((p.fem*(1-p.fem)) / (number.seq)) dfCI <- data.frame(number.ll95, number.ul95, number.ll999, number.ul999, number.seq, p.fem) ## draw plot #TH: note that we need to tweak the limits of the y-axis fp <- ggplot(aes(x = number, y = p), data = df) + geom_point(shape = 1) + geom_line(aes(x = number.seq, y = number.ll95), data = dfCI) + geom_line(aes(x = number.seq, y = number.ul95), data = dfCI) + geom_line(aes(x = number.seq, y = number.ll999, linetype = 2), data = dfCI) + geom_line(aes(x = number.seq, y = number.ul999, linetype = 2), data = dfCI) + geom_hline(aes(yintercept = p.fem), data = dfCI) + scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0,0.0004)) + xlab("number") + ylab("p") + theme_bw()

fp

As I said above, it can be quite dangerous just pinching other folks’ stats code if you aren’t a statistician and don’t really know whether you have actually replicated someone else’s analysis or done something completely different… (this is a situation I often find myself in!); which is why I think we need to encourage folk who release statistical reports to not only release their data, but also show their working, including the code they used to generate any summary tables or charts that appear in those reports.

In addition, it’s worth noting that cribbing other folk’s code and analyses and applying it to your own data may lead to a nonsense result because some stats analyses only work if the data has the right sort of distribution…So be aware of that, always post your own working somewhere, and if someone then points out that it’s nonsense, you’ll hopefully be able to learn from it…

Given those caveats, what I hope to have done is raise awareness of what R can be used to do (including pulling data into a stats computing environment via an HTML table screenscrape) and also produced some sort of recipe we could take to a statistician to say: is this the sort of thing Ben Goldacre was talking about? And if not, why not?

[If I’ve made any huge – or even minor – blunders in the above, please let me know… There’s always a risk in cutting and pasting things that look like they produce the sort of thing you’re interested in, but may actually be doing something completely different!]

PS for how to generate reports that can (optionally) also self-document with actually source R code, see How might data journalists show their working? Sweave. The code used in, and comments added to, that post make further refinements to the funnel plot code.

November 1, 2011

How Might Data Journalists Show Their Working? Sweave

If part of the role of data journalism is to make transparent the justification behind claims that are, or aren’t, backed up by data, there’s good reason to suppose that the journalists should be able to back up their own data-based claims with evidence about how they made use of the data. Posting links to raw data helps to a certain extent – at least third parties can then explore the data themselves and check the claims the press are making – but you could also argue that the journalists should also make their notes available regarding how they worked the data. (The same is true in public reports, where summary statistics and charts are included in a report, along with a link to the raw data, but no transparency in how the summary reports/charts were actually produced from the data.)

In Power Tools for Aspiring Data Journalists: R, I explored how we might use the R statistical programming language to replicate a chart that appeared in one of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science columns. I included code snippets in the post, along with the figures they generated. But is there a way of getting even closer to the source, as it were, and produce documents that essentially generate their output from some sort of “source code”?

For example, take this view of my working relating to the production of the funnel chart described in Goldacre’s column:

You can find the actual “source code” for that document here: bowel cancer funnel plot working notes If you load it into something like RStudio, you can “run” the code and generate your own PDF from it.

The “source” of the document includes both text and R code. When the Sweave document is processed, the R code contained within the document is executed and the results also included in the document. The charts shown in the report are generated directly from the code included in the document, using data pulled in to the document form a source referenced within the document. If the source data is changed, or the R code is changed, what’s contained in the output document will change as well.

This sort of workflow will be familiar to many experimental scientists, but I wonder: is it something that data journalists have considered, at least as a way of keeping working notes about data related projects they are working on?

PS as well as Sweave, see dexy.it, which generalises the Sweave approach to allow you to create self-documenting software/code. Educators, also take note…;-)

January 14, 2013

Press Releases and Convenient Report Publication Formats for Data Journalists

One of the things that I’ve been pondering lately is how I increasingly read the news in a “View Source”* frame of mind, wanting to look behind news stories as reported to read the actual survey report, press release, or Hansard report they take their lead from (more from this in a future post…) – see for example Two can play at that game: When polls collide for a peek behind the polls that drove a couple of conflicting recent news stories. Once you start reading news stories in the context of the press releases that drove them, you can often start to see how little journalistic value add there is to a large proportions of particular sorts of news stories. When FutureLearn was announced, most of the early stories were just a restatement of the press release, for example.

[*View Source refers to the ability, in most desktop based web browsers, to view the HTML source code that is used to generate a rendered HTML web page. That is, you can look to see how a particular visual or design effect in web page was achieved by looking at the code that describes how it was done.]

I’m still a little hazy about what the distinguishing features of “data journalism” actually are (for example, Sketched Thoughts On Data Journalism Technologies and Practice), but for the sake of this post let’s just assume that doing something with an actual data file is necessary part of the process when producing a data driven journalistic story. Note that this might just be limited to re-presenting a supplied data set in a graphical form, or it might involve a rather more detailed analysis that requires, in part, the combination of several different original data sets.

So what might make for a useful “press release” or report publication as far as a data journalist goes? One example might be raw data drops published as part of a predefined public data publication scheme by a public body. But again, for the purposes of this post, I’m more interested in examples of data that is released in a form that is packaged in a that reduces the work the data journalist needs to do and yet still allows them to argue that what they’re doing is data journalism, as defined above (i.e. it involves doing something with a dataset…).

Here are three examples that I’ve seen “in the wild” lately, without doing any real sort of analysis or categorisation of the sorts of thing they contain, the way in which they publish the data, or the sorts of commentary they provide around it. That can come later, if anyone thinks there is mileage in trying to look at data releases in this way…

The press release for the UCAS End of Cycle report 2012 includes headline statistical figures, a link to a PDF report, a link to PNG files of the figures used in the report (so that they can be embedded in articles about the report, presumably) and a link to the datasets used to create the figures used in the report.

Each figure has it’s own datafile in CSV format:

Each datafile also contains editorial metadata, such as chart title and figure number:

The released data thus allows the data journalist (or the art department of a large news organisation…) to publish their own stylised view of the charts (or embed their own biases in the way they display the data…) and do a very limited amount of analysis on that data. The approach is still slightly short of true reproducibility, or replicability, though – it might take a little bit of effort for us to replicate the figure as depicted from the raw dataset, for example in the setting of range limits for numerical axes. (For an old example of what a replicable report might look like, see How Might Data Journalists Show Their Working?. Note that tools and workflows have moved on since that post was written – I really need to do an update. If you’re interested in examples of what’s currently possible, search for knitr…)

In this sort of release, where data is available separately for each published figure, it may be possible for the data journalist to combine data from different chart-related datasets (if they are compatible) into a new dataset. For example, if two separate charts displayed the performance of the same organisations on two different measures, we might be able to generate a single dataset that lets us plot a “dodged” bar chart showing the performance of each of those organisations against the two measures on the same chart; where two charts compare the behaviour of the same organisations at two different times, we may be able to combine the data to produce a slopegraph. And so on…

The ONS – the Office of National Statistics – had a hard time in December 2012 from the House of Commons Public Administration Committee over its website as part of an inquiry on Communicating and publishing statistics (see also the session the day before). I know I struggle with the ONS website from time to time, but it’s maybe worth considering as a minimum viable product, and to start iterating…?

So for example, the ONS publishes lots of statistical bulletins using what appears to be a templated format. For example, if we look at the Labour Market Statistics, December 2012, we see a human readable summary of the headline items in the release along with links to specific data files containing the data associated with each chart and a download area for data associated with the release:

If we look at the Excel data file associated with a “difference over time” chart, we notice the the data used to derive the difference is also included:

In this case, we could generate a slope graph directly from the datafile associated with the chart, even though not all that information was displayed in the original chart.

(This might then be a good rule of thumb for testing the quality of “change” data supplied as part of a data containing press release – are the original figures that are differenced to create the difference values also released?)

If we follow the data in this release link, we find a set of links to a whole range of downloadable statistical data tables, as well as “Datasets associated with this release”

It can all start getting a bit rathole, rabbit warren from here on in… For example, here are the datasets related with the statistical bulletin:

Here’s a page for the Labour Market statistics dataset, and so on…

That said, the original statistical bulletin does provide specific data downloads that are closely tied to each chart contained within the bulletin.

The third example is the Chief Medical Officer’s 2012 annual report, a graphically rich report published in November 2012. (It’s really worth a look…) The announcement page mentions that “All of the underlying data used to create the images in this report will be made available at data.gov.uk.” (The link points to the top level of the data.gov.uk site). A second link invites you to Read the CMO’s report, leading to a page that breaks out the report in the form of links to chapter level PDFs. However, that page also describes how “When planning this report, the Chief Medical Officer decided to make available all of the data used to create images in the report“, which in turn leads to a page that contains links to a set of Dropbox pages that allow you to download data on a chapter by chapter basis from the first volume of the report in an Excel format.

Whilst the filenames are cryptic, and the figures in the report not well identified, the data is available, which is a Good Thing. (The page also notes: “The files produced this year cannot be made available in csv format. This option will become available once the Chief Medical Officer’s report is refreshed.” I’m not sure if that means CSV versions of the data will be produced for this report, or will be produced for future versions of the report, in the sense of the CMO’s Annual Report for 2013, etc?)

Once again, though, there may still be work to be done recreating a particular chart from a particular dataset (not least because some of the charts are really quite beautiful!;-) Whilst it may seem a little churlish to complain about a lack of detail about how to generate a particular chart from a particular dataset, I would just mention that one reason the web developed its graphical richness so quickly was that by “Viewing Source” developers could pinch the good design ideas they saw on other websites and implement (and further develop) them simply by cutting and pasting code from one page into another.

What each of the three examples described shows is an opening up of the data immediately behind a chart (and in at least one example from the ONS, making available the data from which the data displayed in a difference chart was calculated), and good examples of a basic form of data transparency? The reader does not have to take a ruler to a chart to work out what value a particular point is (which can be particularly hard on log-log or log-lin scale charts!), they can look it up in the original data table used to generate the chart. Taking them as examples of support for a “View Source” style of behaviour, what other forms of “View Source” supporting behaviour should we be trying to encourage?

PS If we now assume that the PR world is well versed with the idea that there are data journalists (or chart producing graphics editors) out there and that they do produce data bearing press releases for them. How might the PR folk try to influence the stories the data journalists tell by virtue of the data they release to them, and the way in which they release it?

PPS by the by, I noticed today that there is a British Standard Guide to presentation of tables and graphs [ BS 7581:1992 ] (as well as several other documents providing guidance on different forms of “statistical interpretation”). But being a British Standard, you have to pay to see it… unless you have a subscription, of course; which is one of the perks you get as a member of an academic library with just such a subscription. H/T to “Invisible librarian” (in sense of Joining the Flow – Invisible Library Tech Support) Richard Nurse (@richardn2009) for prefetching me a link to the OU’s subscription on British Standards Online in rsponse to a tweet I made about it:-)

February 7, 2013

Local News Templates – A Business Opportunity for Data Journalists?

As well as serendipity, I believe in confluence…

A headline in the Press Gazette declares that Trinity Mirror will be roll[ing] out five templates across 130-plus regional newspapers as emphasis moves to digital. Apparently, this follows a similar initiative by Johnston Press midway through last year: Johnston to roll out five templates for network of titles.

It seems that “key” to the Trinity Mirror initiative is the creation of a new “Shared Content Unit” based in Liverpool that will provide features content to Trinity’s papers across the UK [which] will produce material across the regional portfolio in print and online including travel, fashion, food, films, books and “other content areas that do not require a wholly local flavour”.

[Update – 25/3/13: Trinity Mirror to create digital data journalism unit to produce content for online and printed titles]

In my local rag last week, (the Isle of Wight County Press), a front page story on the Island’s gambling habit localised a national report by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals. The report included a dataset (“To find the stats for your area download the spreadsheet here and click on the arrow in column E to search for your MP”) that I’m guessing (I haven’t checked…) provided some of the numerical facts in the story. (The Guardian Datastore also republished the data (£5bn gambled on Britain’s poorest high streets: see the data) with an additional column relating to “claimant count”, presumably the number of unemployment benefit claimants in each area (again, I haven’t checked…)) Localisation appeared in several senses:

So for example, the number of local betting shops and Fixed Odds betting terminals was identified, the mooted spend across those and the spend per head of population. Sensemaking of the figures was also applied by relating the spend to an equivalent number of NHS procedures or police jobs. (Things like the BBC Dimensions How Big Really provide one way of coming up with equivalent or corresponding quantities, at least in geographical area terms. (There is also a “How Many Really” visualisation for comparing populations.) Any other services out there like this? Maybe it’s possible to craft Wolfram Alpha queries to do this?)

Something else I spotted, via RBloggers, a post by Alex Singleton of the University of Liverpool: an Open Atlas around the 2011 Census for England and Wales, who has “been busy writing (and then running – around 4 days!) a set of R code that would map every Key Statistics variable for all local authority districts”. The result is a set of PDF docs for each Local Authority district mapping out each indicator. As well as publishing the separate PDFs, Alex has made the code available.

So what’s confluential about those?

The IWCP article localises the Fairer Gambling data in several ways:
– the extent of the “problem” in the local area, in terms of numbers of betting shops and terminals;
– a consideration of what the spend equates to on a per capita basis (the report might also have used a population of over 18s to work out the average “per adult islander”); note that there are also at least a couple of significant problems with calculating per capita averages in this example: first, the Island is a holiday destination, and the population swings over the summer months; secondly, do holidaymakers spend differently to residents on this machines?
– a corresponding quantity explanation that recasts the numbers into an equivalent spend on matters with relevant local interest.

The Census Atlas takes one recipe and uses it to create localised reports for each LA district. (I’m guessing with a quick tweak,separate reports could be generated for the different areas within a single Local Authority).

Trinity Mirror’s “Shared Content Unit” will produce content “that do[es] not require a wholly local flavour”, presumably syndicating it to its relevant outlets. But it’s not hard to also imagine a “Localisable Content” unit that develops applications that can help produced localised variants of “templated” stories produced centrally. This needn’t be quite as automated as the line taken by computational story generation outfits such as Narrative Science (for example, Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers? or Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?) but instead could produce a story outline or shell that can be localised.

A shorter term approach might be to centrally produce data driven applications that can be used to generate charts, for example, relevant to a locale in an appropriate style. So for example, using my current tool of choice for generating charts, R, we could generate something and then allow local press to grab data relevant to them and generate a chart in an appropriate style (for example, Style your R charts like the Economist, Tableau … or XKCD). This approach saves duplication of effort in getting the data, cleaning it, building basic analysis and chart tools around it, and so on, whilst allowing for local customisation in the data views presented. With the increasing number of workflows available around R, (for example, RPubs, knitr, github, and a new phase for the lab notebook, Create elegant, interactive presentations from R with Slidify, [Wordpress] Bloggin’ from R).

Using R frameworks such as Shiny, we can quickly build applications such as my example NHS Winter Sitrep data viewer (about) that explores how users may be able to generate chart reports at Trust or Strategic Health Authority level, and (if required) download data sets related to those areas alone for further analysis. The data is scraped and cleaned once, “centrally”, and common analyses and charts coded once, “centrally”, and can then be used to generate items at a local level.

The next step would be to create scripted story templates that allow journalists to pull in charts and data as required, and then add local colour – quotes from local representatives, corresponding quantities that are somehow meaningful. (I should try to build an example app from the Fairer Gaming data, maybe, and pick up on the Guardian idea of also adding in additional columns…again, something where the work can be done centrally, looking for meaningful datasets and combining it with the original data set.)

Business opportunities also arise outside media groups. For example, a similar service idea could be used to provide story templates – and pull-down local data – to hyperlocal blogs. Or a ‘data journalism wire service’ could develop applications either to aid in the creation of data supported stories on a particular topic. PR companies could do a similar thing (for example, appifying the Fairer Gambling data as I “appified” the NHS Winter sitrep data, maybe adding in data such as the actual location of fixed odds betting terminals. (On my to do list is packaging up the recently announced UCAS 2013 entries data.)).

The insight here is not to produce interactive data apps (aka “news applications”) for “readers” who have no idea how to use them or what read from them whatever stories they might tell; rather, the production of interactive applications for generating charts and data views that can be used by a “data” journalist. Rather than having a local journalist working with a local team of developers and designers to get a data flavoured story out, a central team produces a single application that local journalists can use to create a localised version of a particular story that has local meaning but at national scale.

Note that by concentrating specialisms in a central team, there may also be the opportunity to then start exploring the algorithmic annotation of local data records. It is worth noting that Narrative Science are already engaged in this sort activity too, as for example described in this ProPublica article on How To Edit 52,000 Stories at Once, a news application that includes “short narrative descriptions of almost all of the more than 52,000 schools in our database, generated algorithmically by Narrative Science”.

PS Hmm… I wonder… is there time to get a proposal together on this sort of idea for the Carnegie Trust Neighbourhood News Competition? Get in touch if you’re interested…

May 31, 2013

So what is a data journalist exactly? A view from the job ads…

A quick snapshot of how the data journalism scene is evolving at the moment based on job ads over the last few months…

Via mediauk, I’m not sure when this post for a Junior Data Journalist, Trinity Mirror Regionals (Manchester) was advertised (maybe it was for its new digital journalism unit?)? Here’s what they were looking for:

Trinity Mirror is seeking to recruit a junior data journalist to join its new data journalism unit.

Based in Manchester, the successful applicant will join a small team committed to using data to produce compelling and original content for its website and print products.

You will be expected to combine a high degree of technical skill – in terms of finding, interrogating and visualising data – with more traditional journalistic skills, like recognising stories and producing content that is genuinely useful to consumers.

Reporting to the head of data journalism, the successful candidate will be expected to help create and develop data-based packages, solve problems, find and ‘scrape’ key sources of data, and assist with the production of regular data bulletins flagging up news opportunities to editors and heads of content across the group.

You need to have bags of ideas, be as comfortable with sport as you are with news, know the tools to source and turn data into essential information for our readers and have a strong eye for detail.
This is a unique opportunity for a creative, motivated and highly-skilled individual to join an ambitious project from its start.

You will be expected to combine a high degree of technical skill – in terms of finding, interrogating and visualising data – with more traditional journalistic skills, like recognising stories and producing content that is genuinely useful to consumers.

Reporting to the head of data journalism, the successful candidate will be expected to help create and develop data-based packages, solve problems, find and ‘scrape’ key sources of data, and assist with the production of regular data bulletins flagging up news opportunities to editors and heads of content across the group.

You need to have bags of ideas, be as comfortable with sport as you are with news, know the tools to source and turn data into essential information for our readers and have a strong eye for detail.

News International were also recruiting a data journalist earlier this year, but I can’t find a copy of the actual ad.

From March, £23k-26k pa was on offer for a “Data Journalist” role that involved:

Identification of industry trends using quantitative-based research methods
Breaking news stories using digital research databases as a starting point
Researching & Analysing commercially valuable data for features, reports and events

Maintaining the Insolvency Today Market Intelligence Database (MID)
Mastering search functions and navigation of public databases such as London Gazette, Companies House, HM Court Listings, FSA Register, etc.
Using data trends as a basis for news stories and then using qualitative methods to structure stories and features.
Researching and producing content for the Insolvency cluster of products. (eg. Insolvency Today, Insolvency News, Insolvency BlackBook, Insolvency & Rescue Awards, etc.)
Identifying new data sources and trends, relevant to the Insolvency cluster.
Taking news stories published from rival sources and creating ‘follow up’ and analysis pieces using fresh data.
Occasional reporting from the High Court.
Liaising with the sales, events and marketing teams to share relevant ideas.
Sharing critical information with, and supporting sister editorial teams in the Credit and Payroll clusters.
Attending industry events to build contacts, network and represent the company.

On the other hand, a current rather clueless looking ad is offering £40k-60k for a “Data Journalist/Creative Data Engineer”:

Data Journalist/Creative Data Engineer is required by a leading digital media company based in Central London. This role is going to be working alongside a team of data modellers/statistical engineers and “bringing data to life”; your role will specifically be looking over data and converting it from “technical jargon” to creative, well written articles and white papers. This role is going to be pivotal for my client and has great scope for career progression.

To be considered for this role, you will ideally be a Data Journalist at the moment in the digital media space. You will have a genuine interest in the digital media industry and will have more than likely produced a white paper in the past or articles for publications such as AdAge previously. You will have a creative mind and will feel confident taking information from data and creating creative and persuasive written articles. Whilst this is not a technical role by anymeans it would definitely be of benefit if you had some basic technical knowledge with data mining or statistical modelling tools.

Here’s what the Associated Press were looking for from “Newsperson/Interactive Data Journalist”:

The ideal candidate will have experience with database management, data analysis and Web application development. (We use Ruby for most of our server-side coding, but we’re more interested in how you’ve solved problems with code than in the syntax you used to solve them.) Experience with the full lifecycle of a data project is vital, as the data journalist will be involved at every stage: discovering data resources, helping craft public records requests, managing data import and validation, designing queries and working with reporters and interactive designers to produce investigative stories and interactive graphics that engage readers while maintaining AP’s standards of accuracy and integrity.

Experience doing client-side development is a great advantage, as is knowledge of data visualization and UI design. If you have an interest in DevOps, mapping solutions or advanced statistical and machine learning techniques, we will want to hear about that, too. And if you have shared your knowledge through technical training or mentorship, those skills will be an important asset.

Most importantly, we’re looking for someone who wants to be part of a team, who can collaborate and communicate with people of varying technical levels. And the one absolute requirement is intellectual curiosity: if you like to pick up new technologies for fun and aren’t afraid to throw yourself into research to become the instant in-house expert on a topic, then you’re our kind of candidate.

And a post that’s still open at the time of writing – “Interactive Data Journalist ” with the FT:

The Financial Times is seeking an experienced data journalist to join its Interactive News team, a growing group of journalists, designers and developers who work at the heart of the FT newsroom to develop innovative forms of online storytelling. This position is based at our office in London.

You will have significant experience in obtaining, processing and presenting data in the context of news and features reporting. You have encyclopedic knowledge of the current best practices in data journalism, news apps, and interactive data visualisation.

Wrangling data is an everyday part of this job, so you are a bit of a ninja in Excel, SQL, Open Refine or a statistics package like Stata or R. You are conversant in HTML and CSS. In addition, you will be able to give examples of other tools, languages or technologies you have applied to editing multimedia, organising data, or presenting maps and statistics online.
More important than your current skillset, however, is a proven ability to solve problems independently and to constantly update your skills in a fast-evolving field.

While you will primarily coordinate the production of interactive data visualisations, you will be an all-round online journalist willing and able to fulfil other roles, including podcast production, writing and editing blog posts, and posting to social media.

We believe in building people’s careers by rotating them into different jobs every few years so you will also be someone who specifically wants to work for the FT and is interested in (or prepared to become interested in) the things that interest us.

So does that make it any clearer what a data journalist is or does?!

PS you might also find this relevant: Tow Center for Digital Journalism report on Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present

December 19, 2013

So You Want to be a Data Journalist? Current Opportunities

Every so often I do a round up of job openings in different areas. This is particular true around year end, as I look at my dwindling salary (no more increments, ever, and no hope of promotion, …) and my overall lack of direction, and try to come up with sort sort of resolution to play with during the first few weeks of the year.

The data journalism phrase has being around for some time now (was it really three and half years ago since Data Driven Journalism Round Table at the European Journalism Centre? (FFS, what have I been doing for the last three years?!:-( and it seems to be maturing a little. We’ve had the period of shiny, shiny web apps requiring multiskilled development teams and designers working with the hacks to produce often confusing and wtf am I supposed to be doing now?! interactives and things seem to be becoming a little more embedded… Perhaps…

My reading (as an outsider) is that there is now more of a move towards developing some sort of data skillbase that allows journalists to do “investigative” sorts of things with data, often using very small data sets or concise summary datasets. To complement this, there seems to be some sort of hope that visually appealing charts can be used to hook eyeballs into a story (rather than pushing eyeballs away) – Trinity Mirror’s Ampp3d (as led by Martin Belam) is a good example of this, as is the increasing(?) use of the DataWrapper library.

From working with the School of Data, as well as a couple of bits of data journalism not-really-training with some of the big news groups, I’ve come to realise there is probably some really basic, foundational work to be done in the way people think (or don’t think) about data. For example, I don’t believe that people in general read charts. I think they may glance at them, but they don’t try to read them. They have no idea what story they tell. Given a line chart that plots some figure over time. How many people ride the line to get a feel for how it really changed?

Hans Rosling famously brings data alive with his narrative commentary around animated development data charts, including bar charts…

But if you watch the video with the sound off, or just look at the final chart, do you have the feeling of being told the same story? Can you even retell yourself the story by looking at the chart. And how about if you look at another bar chart? Can you use any of Hans Rosling’s narrative or rhetorical tricks to help you read through those?

(The rhetoric of data (and the malevolent arts of persuasion) is something I want to ponder in more depth next year, along with the notion of data aesthetics and the theory of forms given a data twist.)

Another great example of narrated data storytelling comes from Kurt Vonnegut as he describes the shapes of stories:

Is that how you read a line chart when you see one?

One thing about the data narration technique is that it is based around the construction of a data trace. There is a sense of anticipation about where the line will go next, and uncertainty as to what sort of event will cause the line to move one way or another. Looking back at a completed data chart, what points do we pick from it that we want to use as events in our narration or reading of it? (The lines just connect the points – they are processional in the way they move us from one point of interest to the next, although the gradient of the line may provide us with ideas for embellishing or decorating the story a little.)

It’s important to make art because the people that get the most out of art are the ones that make it. It’s not … You know there’s this idea that you go to a wonderful art gallery and it’s good for you and it makes you a better person and it informs your soul, but actually the person who’s getting the most out of any artistic activity is the person who makes it because they’re sort of expressing themselves and enjoying it, and they’re in the zone and you know it’s a nice thing to do. [Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures 2013, Lecture 2, Q&A [transcript, PDF], audio]

In the same way, the person who gets the most out of a chart is the person who constructed it. They know what they left in and what they left out. They know why the axes are selected as they are, why elements are coloured or sized as they are. They know the question that led up to the chart and the answers it provides to those questions. They know where to look. Like an art critic who reads their way round a painting, they know how to read one or many different stories from the chart.

The interactives that appeared during the data journalism wave from a couple of years ago sought to provide a playground for people to play with data and tells their own stories with it. But they didn’t. In part because they didn’t know how to play with data, didn’t know how to use it in a constructive way as part of a narrative, (even a made up, playful narrative). And in part this comes back to not knowing how to read – that is, recover stories from – a chart.

It is often said that a picture saves a thousand words, but if the picture tells a thousand word story, how many of us try to read that thousand word story from each picture or chart? Maybe we need to use a thousand words as well as the chart? (How many words does Hans Rosling use? How many, Kurt Vonnegut?)

When producing a chart that essentially represents a summary of a conversation with have had with a dataset, it’s important to remember that for someone looking at the final chart it might not make as much sense in absence of the narrative that was used to construct it. Edward de Bono’s constructed illustrations helps read a the final image through recalling his narrative. But if we just look at a “completed” sketch from one of his talks, it will probably be meaningless.

One of the ideas that works for me when I reflect on my own playing with data is that it is a conversation. Meaning is constructed through the conversation I have with a dataset, and the things it reveals when I pose particular questions to it. In many cases, these questions are based on filtering a dataset, although the result may be displayed in many ways. The answers I get to a question inform the next question I want to ask. Questions take the form of constructing this chart as opposed to that chart, though I am free to ask the same question in many slightly different ways if the answers don’t appear to be revealing of anything.

It is in this direction – of seeing data as a source that can be interviewed and coaxed into telling stories – that I sense elements of the data journalism thang are developing. This leads naturally into seeing data journalism skills as core investigative style skills that all journalists would benefit from. (Seeing things as data allows you to ask particular sorts of question in very particular ways. Being able to cast things into a data form – as for example in Creating Data from Text – Regular Expressions in OpenRefine) – so that they become amenable to data-style queries, is the next idea I think we need to get across…

So what are the jobs that are out at the moment? Here’s a quick round-up of some that I’ve spotted…

Data editor (Guardian): “develop and implement a clear strategy for the Data team and the use of data, numbers and statistics to generate news stories, analysis pieces, blogs and fact checks for The Guardian and The Observer.
You will take responsibility for commissioning and editing content for the Guardian and Observer data blogs as well as managing the research needs of the graphics department and home and foreign news desks. With day-to-day managerial responsibility for a team of three reporters / researchers working on the data blog, you will also be responsible for data analysis and visualisation: using a variety of specialist software and online tools, including Tableau, ARCGis, Google Fusion, Microsoft Access and Excel”

Perpetuating the “recent trad take” on data journalism, viewed as gonzo journalist hacker:

Data Journalist [Telegraph Media Group]: “[S]ource, sift and surface data to find and generate stories, assist with storytelling and to support interactive team in delivering data projects.
“The Data Journalist will sit within the Interactive Data team, and will work with a team of designers, web developers and journalists on data-led stories and in developing innovative interactive infographics, visualisations and news applications. They will need to think and work fast to tackle on-going news stories and tight deadlines.
“Applicants should have a portfolio of relevant work and bylines on data-led stories and/or interactive graphics. The role will include mentoring and training opportunities, but candidates should feel confident working with HTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL, even if they are not writing code themselves. Experience of writing scrapers and using statistical software (e.g. R) is desired, but not essential.
One of the most exciting opportunities that I can see around data related published is in new workflows and minimising the gap between investigative tools and published outputs. This seems to me a bit risky in that it seems so conservative when it comes to getting data outputs actually published?
Designer [Trinity Mirror]: “Trinity Mirror’s pioneering data unit is looking for a first-class designer to work across online and print titles. … You will be a whizz with design software – such as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign – and understand the principles of designing infographics, charts and interactives for the web. You will also be able to design simple graphical templates for re-purposing around the group.
“You should have a keen interest in current affairs and sport, and be familiar with – and committed to – the role data journalism can play in a modern newsroom.”
[Trinity Mirror]: Can you take an API feed and turn it into a compelling gadget which will get the whole country talking?
“Trinity Mirror’s pioneering data unit is looking for a coder/developer to help it take the next step in helping shape the future of journalism. …
“You will be able to create tools which automatically grab the latest data and use them to create interactive, dynamically-updated charts, maps and gadgets across a huge range of subjects – everything from crime to football. …
“The successful candidate will have a thorough knowledge of scraping techniques, ability to manage a database using SQL, and demonstrable ability in at least one programming language.”

But there is hope about the embedding of data skills as part of everyday journalistic practice:

Culture report (Guardian): “We are looking for a Culture Reporter to generate stories and cover breaking news relating to Popular Culture, Film and Music … Applicants should also have expertise with digital tools including blogging, social media, data journalism and mobile publishing. “
Investigations Correspondent [BBC Newsnight]: “Reporting to the Editor, the Investigations Correspondent will contribute to Newsnight by producing long term investigations as well as sometimes contributing to big ongoing stories. Some investigations will take months, but there will also be times when we’ll need to dig up new lines on moving the stories in days.
“We want a first rate reporter with a proven track record of breaking big stories who can comfortably work across all subject areas from politics to sport. You will be an established investigative journalist with a wide range of contacts and sources as well as having experience with a range of different investigative approaches including data journalism, Freedom Of Information (FOI) and undercover reporting.”
News Reporter, GP [Haymarket Medical Media]: “GP is part of Haymarket Medical Media, which also produces MIMS, Medeconomics, Inside Commissioning, and mycme.com, and delivers a wide range of medical education projects. …
“Ideally you will also have some experience of data journalism, understand how social media can be used to enhance news coverage and have some knowledge of multimedia journalism, including video and blogs.”
Reporter, ENDS Report [Haymarket]: “We are looking for someone who has excellent reporting and writing skills, is enthusiastic and able to digest and summarise in depth documents and analysis. You will also need to be comfortable with dealing with numbers and statistics and prepared to sift through data to find the story that no one else spots.
“Ideally you will have some experience of data journalism, understand how social media can be used to enhance news coverage.”

Are there any other current ones I’m missing?

I think the biggest shift we need is to get folk treating data as a source that responds to a particular style of questioning. Learning how to make the source comfortable and get it into a state where you can start to ask it questions is one key skill. Knowing how to frame questions so that discover the answers you need for a story are another. Choosing which bits of the conversation you use in a report (if any – maybe the conversation is akin to a background chat?) yet another.

Treating data as a source also helps us think about how we need to take care with it – how not to ask leading questions, how not to get it to say things it doesn’t mean. (On the other hand, some folk will undoubtedly force the data to say things it never intended to say…

“If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess” [Ronald Coase]

[Disclaimer: I started looking at some medical data for Haymarket.]

September 24, 2017

Responsibilities and Required Skills in Recent “Data Journalist” Job ads…

A quick peek at a couple of recent job ads that describe what you might be expected to do…

From the BBC – Senior Data Journalist. In part, the role responsibilities include:

generating ideas for data-driven stories and for how they might be developed and visualized
exploring those ideas using statistical tools – and presenting them to wider stakeholders from a non-statistical background
reporting on and analysing data in a way that contributes to telling compelling stories on an array of news platforms
collaborating with reporters, editors, designers and developers to bring those stories to publication
exploring and summarizing data using relational database software
visualizing and to find patterns in spatial data using GIS software
using statistical tools to identify significant data trends
representing the data team and the Visual Journalism team at editorial meetings
leading editorially on data projects as required and overseeing the work of other data team colleagues
using skills and experience to advise on best approaches to data-led storytelling and the development and publication of data-led projects

Required technical skills include “a good understanding of statistics and statistical analysis; a strong grasp of how to clean, parse and query data; a good knowledge of some of the following: spreadsheet software, SQL, Python and R; demonstrable experience of visualising data, using either tools or scripts; experience of GIS or other mapping software; experience of gathering information from Freedom of Information requests”.

Desirable skills include “knowledge of basic scripting and HTML, as it might pertain to data visualization or data analysis and knowledge of several of the following; Carto, D3, QGIS, Tableau”.

And over at Trinity Mirror, there’s an open position for a data journalist, where role responsibilities include:

Having ideas for data-based stories and analysis, on a range of topics, which would be suitable for visualisation in regional newspapers across the group.
Working with a designer and the head of data journalism to come up with original and engaging ways of visualising this content.
Writing copy, as required, to accompany these visualisations.
Working on the data unit’s wider output, for print and web, as required by the head of data journalism.

As far as technical skills go, these “should include a broad knowledge of UK data sources, an ability to quickly and effectively interrogate data using spreadsheets, and an understanding of the pros and cons of different methods of visualising data”. In addition, “[a]n ability to use scraping software, and some proficiency in using R, would be an advantage”.

June 28, 2010

So Where Do the Numbers in Government Reports Come From?

Last week, the COI (Central Office of Information) released a report on the “websites run by ministerial and non-ministerial government departments”, detailing visitor numbers, costs, satisfaction levels and so on, in accordance with COI standards on guidance on website reporting (Reporting on progress: Central Government websites 2009-10).

As well as the print/PDF summary report (Reporting on progress: Central Government websites 2009-10 (Summary) [PDF, 33 pages, 942KB]) , a dataset was also released as a CSV document (Reporting on progress: Central Government websites 2009-10 (Data) [CSV, 66KB]).

The summary report is full of summary tables on particular topics, for example:

TABLE 1: REPORTED TOTAL COSTS OF DEPARTMENT-RUN WEBSITES

TABLE 2: REPORTED WEBSITE COSTS BY AREA OF SPENDING

TABLE 3: USAGE OF DEPARTMENT-RUN WEBSITES

Whilst I firmly believe it is a Good Thing that the COI published the data alongside the report, there is a still a disconnect between the two. The report is publishing fragments of the released dataset as information in the form of tables relating to particular reporting categories – reported website costs, or usage, for example – but there is no direct link back to the CSV data table.

Looking at the CSV data, we see a range of columns relating to costs, such as:

and:

There are also columns headed SEO/SIO, and HEO, for example, that may or may not relate to costs? (To see all the headings, see the CSV doc on Google spreadsheets).

But how does the released data relate to the summary reported data? It seems to me that there is a huge “hence” between the released CSV data and the summary report. Relating the two appears to be left as an exercise for the reader (or maybe for the data journalist looking to hold the report writers to account?).

The recently published New Public Sector Transparency Board and Public Data Transparency Principles, albeit in draft form, has little to say on this matter either. The principles appear to be focussed on the way in which the data is released, in a context free way, (where by “context” I mean any of the uses to which government may be putting the data).

For data to be useful as an exercise in transparency, it seems to me that when government releases reports, or when government, NGOs, lobbiests or the media make claims using summary figures based on, or derived from, government data, the transparency arises from an audit trail that allows us to see where those numbers came from.

So for example, around the COI website report, the Guardian reported that “[t]he report showed uktradeinvest.gov.uk cost £11.78 per visit, while businesslink.gov.uk cost £2.15.” (Up to 75% of government websites face closure). But how was that number arrived at?

The publication of data means that report writers should be able to link to views over original government data sets that show their working. The publication of data allows summary claims to be justified, and contributes to transparency by allowing others to see the means by which those claims were arrived at and the assumptions that went in to making the summary claim in the first place. (By summary claim, I mean things like “non-staff costs were X”, or the “cost per visit was Y”.)

[Just an aside on summary claims made by, or “discovered” by, the media. Transparency in terms of being able to justify the calculation from raw data is important because people often use the fact that a number was reported in the media as evidence that the number is in some sense meaningful and legitimately derived. (“According to the Guardian/Times/Telegraph/FT, etc etc etc”. To a certain extent, data journalists need to behave like academic researchers in being able to justify their claims to others.]

In Using CSV Docs As a Database, I show how by putting the CSV data into a Google spreadsheet, we can generate several different views over the data using the using the Google Query language. For example, here’s a summary of the satisfaction levels, and here’s one over some of the costs:

select A,B,EL,EN,EP,ER,ET

[For more background to using Google spreadsheets as a database, see: Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database with the Google Visualisation API Query Language (via an API) and Using Google Spreadsheets Like a Database – The QUERY Formula (within Google spreadsheets itself)]

We can even have a go at summing the costs:

select A,B,EL+EN+EP+ER+ET

In short, it seems to me that releasing the data as data is a good start, but the promise for transparency lays in being able to share queries over data sets that make clear the origins of data-derived information that we are provided with, such as the total non-staff costs of website development, or the average cost per visit to the blah, blah website.

So what would I like to see? Well, for each of the tables in the COI website report, a link to a query over the co-released CSV dataset that generates the summary table “live” from the original dataset would be a start… ;-)

PS In the meantime, to the extent that journalists and the media hold government to account, is there maybe a need for data journalysts (journalist+analyst portmanteau) to recreate the queries used to generate summary tables in government reports to find out exactly how they were derived from released data sets? Finding queries over the COI dataset that generate the tables published in the summary report is left as an exercise for the reader… ;-) If you manage to generate queries, in a bookmarkable form (e.g. using the COI website data explorer (see also this for more hints), please feel free to share the links in the comments below :-)