Liz Truss now has the job of leading the Conservative Party and of running the country. So who gave her the money for her campaign? MPs in Britain have to declare any money they receive, via donations or second jobs for example, and this is listed in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The website […]
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Sharing Jupyter notebooks online
You have a great Jupyter notebook you’ve been working on. If only you could share it with the world: here are some options for getting your notebook online. If you just want to show a notebook to people without them running the code, nbviewer does the job by showing the cells and their output (beware […]
What we did in 12 weeks of data journalism
Now that we’ve finished a first semester of data journalism work, I’ve put the module details online. It’s not an online course but it does have our Reading List, a running list of Interesting Datasets for practice (or work) and outlines of what we did each week in the Great Academic Year Of The Pandemic […]
Some APIs for journalism
This month we find ourselves digging up data with the help of APIs. While there are oodles of APIs for different things (there’s a Star Wars API and an ISS API and many many others), I wondered which endpoints might be interesting for journalists. So here is a list of some of them — we’ll […]
Tim Harford’s lethal bathtub
Tim Harford’s books are on the reading list for journalism students at Jomec and we are big fans of More or Less. And this month he supplied us all with a great case of numbers going wrong, in a piece for the Financial Times. You can listen to him explaining it on Radio 4’s The […]
Our course after 6 months of Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic shut down our schools at the end of March and sent staff and students alike home to work on their laptops. This meant MSc students finished their group projects using online platforms and started dissertation projects while trying to get back to their home countries, or while stuck in Cardiff. Although the […]
The Clwstwr news projects — update
Clwstwr is a five-year programme in south Wales — run from Cardiff — that was started to encourage the development of original screen-related projects. ‘Screen’ here means anything that involves creative or technological industries in a broad sense. Since it was set up in early 2019, it has allocated funding and development support to 23 […]
Journalism by Numbers — 2019 [Virtual] Summer School
With Cardiff University buildings closed since March because of the Coronavirus pandemic, the Summer School for the public moved online in June, and included a one-hour session on what datajournalists do. The Summer School comprised a week of workshops that ranged from radiography and earth sciences to building design and writing for business. In our […]
Capturing OSINT flags with Cardiff’s Cybersoc
Cardiff University’s Cyber Society gave us all its Capture the Flag challenge earlier this year and now has over a thousand players on its leaderboard, many of them sitting on the maximum score 0f 15,000. The challenges are organised into three streams: ten introductory questions to get you warmed up, 18 tasks for online intelligence […]
SELECT * FROM a day of SQL…
This month our students survived a full-day workshop on SQL, moving from the very basics of the syntax to querying datasets or working through some of the better tutorials. First up was the excellent Select Star tutorial by Zi Chong Kao, which is based on a dataset of US prisoners executed since 1976. We then […]