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Election data — the UK’s December vote

13th December 2019 by Aidan O'Donnell

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.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: hackday, politics, scraping, students, voterpower

Hacking VoterPower with the Bureau Local

31st May 2017 by Martin Chorley

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.

Here's our team in Cardiff about to get stuck into some juicy datasets. We have teams in London, Bournemouth, Glasgow and Birmingham too pic.twitter.com/FFG6JMzurE

— The Bureau Local (@bureaulocal) May 31, 2017

.@bureaulocal is hacking #ge2017 live in 5 cities across the UK: London, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Birmingham and Glasgow! #voterpower pic.twitter.com/Nac7Gjtfo3

— Megan Lucero (@Megan_Lucero) May 31, 2017

We've been at @bureaulocal hack day in Cardiff, digging into #Bristol election data, part of nationwide network. #GE2017 https://t.co/hdRWIm9G6Z

— The Bristol Cable (@TheBristolCable) May 31, 2017

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: bureaulocal, coding, collaboration, data, ge2017, grad, hack, hackday, local, voterpower

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