Computational & Data Journalism @ Cardiff

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NHS Hack Day returns to Cardiff

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At the end of semester two our 2019 students set off (armed with a full semester of javascript) for the Cardiff NHS Hack Day.

This regular event moves around the UK and brings together health specialists, technologists and anyone at all who’s got a suggestion about improving any aspect of healthcare.

There’s an overview of the Cardiff event by one of the judges available here and an account of several of this year’s projects here.

Our Computational Journalism students spent two days working on a app called “Can I eat this?” which allows users with dietary restrictions to scan barcodes on packaging see if a product is safe to consume — their app and their presentation to the judges is available on the Hack Day website and the code is here.

 

Above photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke

Election data — the UK’s December vote

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Elections are a special meeting of journalism and data. They generate lots of both! So the morning after the long night of vote counting, we got this year’s students working on the results for a full day. Four student groups were each given one of the four UK nations. Each group also got a Welsh constituency to analyse; after consulting with our pol corrs on the MA-News programme we decided the interesting Welsh battles would be in Cardiff North, Ceredigion, Caerphilly and Vale of Glamorgan.

The main difficulty with analysing the results was not having the XML feed from PA that UK news organisations had been relying on (and had been testing for weeks). We didn’t have the raw data flowing in as soon as a count was announced. But that’s where the BBC came in — they published results for each constituency in a standardised url, supplying 650 webpages for the UK’s 650 constituencies.

This meant that it was enough to draw up a few lines to grab each page and the corresponding batch of results. If only all large-scale scraping was as clean and consistent!

We were able to publish csv files with full results for the four nations by the end of the day. Now of course you can get them from lots of sources but right after the election, and with results still being declared throughout Friday, we were able to get started on analysing the results once we had these tables.

The people at Flourish provided very helpful templates ahead of the vote. So hex maps, animated bar charts and Sankey diagrams were all ready and waiting for numbers.

Hacking VoterPower with the Bureau Local

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Today we hosted one of several hackdays happening nationwide, organised by The Bureau Local. Journalists from The Bristol Cable joined up with students from the MSc in Computational and Data Journalism to analyse election data, hoping to uncover local data stories around the voters in their local constituencies.

We’re pleased to be able to support one of the first community initiatives from The Bureau Local, which along with their project examining dark advertising on Facebook is beginning to show how they will deliver on their mission to build a “network of journalists and tech experts across the country who will work together to find and tell stories that matter to local communities”.

It was also great to meet up again with MSc Computational Journalism 14/15 grad Charles Boutaud, here representing the Bureau Local in his new role as a developer-journalist in their team.

 

NHS Hackday 2015

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This weekend staff and students from the MSc in Computational Journalism took part in the Cardiff NHS Hackday 2015. Our liveblog of the event is here, and you can see our final product online, with all the code available in our GitHub repository.

We’ve created the foundation for a project (Health Explorer Wales) that can visualise all sorts of health related data across the local authorities and local health boards of Wales. We’ll look to improve this over the coming weeks, with the hope that it can find a community willing to adopt it and drive it forwards in the future.

Health Explorer Wales

Health Explorer Wales

I’ve written a fuller debrief of the event on my personal blog here, and photos from the event are included below. All pictures are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0 licence by Paul Clarke

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