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Report from the successful DataJConf & C+J Conference

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Last week we held the 4th edition of the European Data & Computational Journalism Conference (#datajconf) in Zurich, Switzerland, and this time it was held jointly with the Computation + Journalism Conference (#cplusj), which is usually held in the US.

I’ve written about DataJConf previously, when we held the first edition in Dublin in 2017. We’ve always encouraged a strong multi-disciplinary approach, aiming to attract journalists, developers, industry professionals and academics from across many fields including journalism and media studies, computer science and data science. It was really gratifying to see that this year was no different, with a great mix of all these groups, and more, in attendance. Our teaming up with C+J meant that we had more attendees from the US than we’ve had before, which I think will have been a great opportunity to strengthen links between Europe and the US, and has also helped raise the profile of our European ‘little sister’ conference to the more well established C+J conference.

This was our first conference back since the pandemic, it had been 4 years since we last got together and discussed all things Computational + Data Journalism. It was fascinating to see the progress that has been made in the last few years, and how both academic research and industry practice has evolved.

It’s no surprise that AI dominated much of the agenda, with some very interesting discussion of the use of GenerativeAI by news and media organisations. What was most revealing though was that widespread adoption of GenerativeAI tools is still some way off, if it will ever happen at all. Most organisations that have experimented with these sorts of technologies have found that the unreliability and ‘hallucinations’ that can be introduced create all sorts of integrity and trust issues when using GenAI to create content, which generally outweigh the benefits. Many newsrooms/organisations are instead for now sticking with rule based/templating automation for content generation, which is much more reliable and controllable. Where GenAI has found use is in transforming/summarising existing content, which again can be more controlled/reliable. On the AI front there was also some discussion of deepfakes, and the potential issues arising there, though little discussion of solutions, perhaps because we don’t have them, or perhaps because existing fact-checking and verification techniques are already sufficient to deal with the problem?

The other big development that was noticeable at this conference was the increase in algorithmic accountability efforts – news organisations and others working to investigate the impacts and biases present in algorithmic decision making processes that have a real impact on people and society. An increasingly important area of concern, that was not really touched upon in previous editions of the conference, but which is now a focus for many teams.

Teams was also an interesting revelation from some of the talks and discussions – where previously the EU has perhaps lagged behind the US in terms of the development and position of data/computational teams in the newsroom and other media organisations, it does feel like there has been a change in the intervening years in some organisations, where these teams are now bigger, more established, and perhaps more central. Certainly, whereas in our first edition much of the talk was about small, niche teams on the fringes of media operations, this time it felt like we had a number of talks where the data/computational teams were key to some of the organisational strategy. A good development to see, though it is also clear from a number of talks that there is still work to do in this area.

For a really nice roundup of some of the issues I’ve touched on above, and more, see this thread from Jim Haddadin:

You can also go back and check through the hashtag to see how the conference unfolded.

Overall it was a really successful conference. The local team did a great job pulling it together, and it was great to catch up with familiar faces from previous editions and conferences, and to meet new people too. We’re looking forward to the next edition …

DataJConf 2017

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We’ve recently returned from a trip to Dublin for DataJConf 2017 – the first European Conference on Data and Computational Journalism. Our course directors, Glyn and Martin were co-organisers of the conference, along with Bahareh Heravi of UCD.

We first started talking to Bahareh about organising the conference sometime at the beginning of the year. We’d all recognised that there was a gap in the conference offering in Europe, with nothing really giving us a mix of academia and industry as you find in some of the stateside conferences. We decided that perhaps we could do something about that. We quickly found an excellent mix of keynote speakers, and our call for papers attracted a nice mix of academic and industrial talks, allowing us to put together a varied programme that was interesting to a range of people. We had over 100 attendees to the conference, coming from both industry and academia, which led to a productive two days of discussions, with the first day of talks followed by a day of workshops and an unconference.

We very much enjoyed it, and will be running the next edition in Cardiff in June 2018!

 

The DataJConf team

The DataJConf team

 

Our Alumni: Nikita Vashisth – cutting edge in India

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In our new series of posts we’re taking a look at some of our past students, where they’ve gone, and what they’re up to. First up is Nikita Vashisth, one of the graduates from the first year of our course in 2014/2015.

Two years after leaving the course, Nikita is working with a cutting-edge Indian data journalism team. One of the projects she’s  involved in is to measure air particles to help save lives in cities affected by pollution – something she initially proposed in her major coursework. Nikita said:

“I’m working as a data journalist at IndiaSpend, India’s first data journalism initiative. One of the projects I am currently working on is #Breathe, an air quality monitoring network. We’re analyzing pm2.5 and pm10 levels across Indian cities to understand city-wide high and lows. The vision of the project is to democratize data critical to saving thousands of lives and engage citizens and other stakeholders in a conversation towards solving the life-threatening issue of air pollution.”

And her view of her studies? Nikita added:

 “Being a part of the first COMPJ batch in 2014 was a whirlwind! I was introduced to COMSCI and it opened a whole new world of opportunities in journalism for me. The course takes a practical learning approach in digital journalism, data analysis and coding—which made it all the more fun. The Visual Communication & Information Design and Digital Investigation modules were especially engaging and lead me to understanding the power of data and design in effective storytelling. A big shout out to Glyn and Martin, my course directors/lecturers/mentors whose immense support and knowledge helped me get past the nerve-wracking learning curve by the end of the year.”

We can’t wait to see what Nikita gets up to in the future, and look forward to seeing the projects she comes up with.

Chatbots in the Classroom: Education Innovation Research

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The Computational and Data Journalism team has recently been awarded research funding from the University Centre for Education Innovation to investigate the use of chatbots in the classroom.

The project “proposes the development of chat bots as part of the teaching and learning team to support learning and automate everyday issues to alleviate staff workload.

“This would essentially create an on-demand classroom assistant who can provide informational support whatever schedule students choose to keep outside of the classroom environment and increase their overall satisfaction levels as a result.”

We’ve just hired a 3rd year Computer Science student, Stuart Clark to work with us on the project, and he has started swiftly, working to identify sources of data within the university that such a system can plug into, designing system architectures and interfaces, and beginning work on the implementation.

We’ll follow up this development work over the summer with a live trial of the system in Autumn to see how well it works and assess whether this sort of technology can be successfully used by students and lecturers alike to improve information flow and ease administrative pressures.

We’ll continue to blog about the project as it progresses over the next few months.

Visualising the Creative Industries in Cardiff: CUROP project

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This summer, our team is running a project funded by the CUROP scheme here at Cardiff University. The Creative Cardiff team have collected a large amount of data on the creative industries in Cardiff, and are now looking for new ways to explore and communicate this data. Our summer project is aiming to do just that, bringing in an undergraduate student to gain some experience of the research environment, carry out some exploratory data analysis, and then design and implement visualisations to aid public understanding of the data.

 

Current mapping of Creative Cardiff data

 

We’ve just recruited our student, Samuel Jones, a first year student in the School of Computer Science and Informatics, and we’ll be getting started on the project soon. As we go, we’ll keep the site updated with progress, and point out the final outcomes once they’re released

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.

 

Digital Needles in the Data Haystack

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We’re presenting today at “Investigating (with) Big Data“, a one day symposium being held at Cardiff University by the Digital Culture Network. Our talk, “Digital Needles in the Data Haystack” examines the use of data by news organisations, focusing on the challenges they face when carrying out investigations with increasingly large volumes of data. We discuss the collaborations that organisations have built to get past such problems, and talk about some of the issues surrounding the use of data within newsrooms.

It looks to be an interesting day of talks on a range of different topics connected to ‘Big Data’, and we’re looking forward to it!

Scraping the Assembly

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Glyn is currently teaching the first-semester module on Data Journalism. As part of this, students need to complete a data investigation project. One of the students is looking at the expenses of Welsh Assembly Members. These are all freely available online, but not in an easy to manipulate form. According to the Assembly they’d be happy to give the data out as a spreadsheet, if we submitted an FOI.

To me, this seems quite stupid. The information is all online and freely accessible. You’ve admitted you’re willing to give it out to anyone who submits an FOI. So why not just make the raw data available to download? This does not sound like a helpful Open Government to me. Anyway, for whatever reason, they’ve chosen not to, and we can’t be bothered to wait around for an FOI to come back. It’s much quicker and easier to build a scraper! We’ll just use selenium to drive a web browser, submit a search, page through all the results collecting the details, then dump it all out to csv. Simple.

Scraping the Assembly

I built this as a quick hack this morning. It took about an hour or so, and it shows. The code is not robust in any way, but it works. You can ask it for data from any year (or a number of years) and it’ll happily sit there churning its way through the results and spitting them out as both .csv and .json.

All the code is available on Github and it’s under an MIT Licence. Have fun 😉

Sustainable Software Institute – Research Data Visualisation Workshop

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Last week I gave a talk and delivered a hands on session at the Sustainable Software Institute’s ‘Research Data Visualisation Workshop‘ which was held at Manchester University. It was a really engaging event, with a lot of good discussion on the issues surrounding data visualisation.

Professor Jessie Kennedy from Edinburgh Napier University gave a great keynote looking at a some key design principles in visualisation, including a number of studies I hadn’t seen before but will definitely be including in my teaching in future.

I gave a talk on ‘Human Science Visualisation’ which really focused on a couple of key issues. Firstly, I tried to illustrate the importance of interactivity in complex visualisations. I then talked about how we as academic researchers need publish our interactive visualisations in posterity, and how we should press academic publishers to help us communicate our data to readers. Finally, I wanted to point people towards the excellent visualisation work being done by data journalists, and that the newsrooms are an excellent source of ideas and tips for data visualisation. The slides for my talk are here. It’s the first time I’ve spoken about visualisation outside of the classroom, and it was a really fun talk to give.

We also had two great talks from Dr Christina Bergmann and Dr Andy South, focusing on issues of biological visualisation and mapping respectively. All the talks generated some good discussion both in the room and online, which was fantastic to see.

In the afternoon I lead a hands on session looking at visualising data using d3. This was the first time I’d taught a session using d3 v4, which made things slightly interesting. I’m not fully up to speed with all the areas of the API that have changed, so getting the live coding right first time was a bit tricky, but I think I managed. Interestingly, I feel that the changes made to the .data(), .exit(), .enter(), update cycle as discussed in Mike’s “What Makes Software Good” make a lot more sense from a teaching perspective. The addition of .merge() in particular helps a great deal. As you might expect from a d3 workshop that lasted a mere three hours, I’m not entirely convinced that everybody ‘got’ it, but I think a most went away satisfied.

Overall it was a very successful workshop. Raniere Silva did an excellent job putting it together and running the day, and I really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people thought about it too.

Empty Properties: simple choropleth maps with leaflet.js

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We’re still working on looking at empty properties around Wales, and so while we wait for the FOI request results to come in, I thought it would be interesting to do a bit of basic mapping. Normally, if I want to create a choropleth I reach straight for d3 and my collection of topojson, but we’re still very early in the course, and we haven’t covered d3 yet (we go into it in some detail in next semester’s visualisation course). As we haven’t covered d3 yet, we need a simple solution, and fortunately the leaflet API makes it very easy to draw polygons on top of a map; all we need to know are the coordinates of the shape that we want to draw.

So, first we need to grab boundary files for the parishes around Wales. A quick hunt through the bafflingly obtuse ONS geoportal brings us to the generalised parish boundaries (E+W). Although it doesn’t seem immediately obvious from that page, there is a download link there that allows us to obtain shapefiles containing the boundary data for every parish in England and Wales. Unfortunately, these files are in a rather complicated shapefile format, when all we really need is a list of coordinates that we can throw into some JavaScript. We could extract and transform this data using command line tools, but as this is an early demo, we’ll use some graphical tools to do the work. So, first of all we open up the shapefile in our favourite GIS software:

England + Wales Parish boundaries in QGIS

England + Wales Parish boundaries in QGIS

This is all the parishes for England and Wales, and we only want the boundaries for Wales, so the next thing we’ll do is extract those. Looking at the attribute table, we see that each parish has a code connecting it to it’s Local Authority District (the LAD14CD). Using a simple filter on the ‘LAD14CD’, we can extract all those parishes that are in a local authority district in Wales, by selecting only those LAD14CDs that begin with a ‘W’:

Filtering based on attributes - substr(LAD14CD, 0, 2) = 'W'

Filtering based on attributes

This gives us our Welsh parishes:

Welsh parishes selected

Welsh parishes selected

Now we can save this selection as geoJSON, which is a nicer format to work with than ESRI shapefiles, and will easily be handled by Leaflet. While we’re at it, we can convert the coordinates of the boundary data to WGS84 (which essentially gives us Lat,Lng coordinates we can use with our map):

Saving the selected parishes

Saving the selected parishes

For this example (because we’ve only had a response from Cardiff Council so far), we only need to deal with the Cardiff parishes, so for simplicity we’ll extract the Cardiff parishes from our large geoJSON file into a smaller Cardiff specific file. A quick bit of Python looking for all the parishes with a LAD14CD of ‘W06000015’ is all that’s needed here:

import json

parishes = json.load(open('Wales_Parish.geojson', 'r'))
cardiff_parishes = {'type': parishes['type'], 'crs': parishes['crs'], 'features': []}

for feature in parishes['features']:
 if feature['properties']['LAD14CD'] == 'W06000015':
 cardiff_parishes['features'].append(feature)

json.dump(cardiff_parishes, open('Cardiff_Parish.geojson', 'w'))

This geojson is all we need to display the parish boundaries on our map. In fact, if we edit the geojson file to include

var parishes = {ALL_OUR_GEOJSON_DATA}

We can import this directly into a webpage and load it into a map with leaflet relatively easily using the geoJson function in leaflet:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
 <meta charset="UTF-8">
 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
 
 <title>Empty Properties</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.leafletjs.com/leaflet/v0.7.7/leaflet.css" />
 
 <style>
 html, body, #map {
     height: 100%;
     width: 100%;
 }
 </style>
</head>
<body>
 <div id="map"></div>

 <script src="http://cdn.leafletjs.com/leaflet/v0.7.7/leaflet.js"></script>
 <script src="cardiff_parish.js"></script>
 <script>
   // create map and centre on Cardiff
   var map = L.map('map').setView([51.455, -3.19], 12);

   L.geoJson(parishes).addTo(map);

   // add some mapbox tiles
   var tileLayer = L.tileLayer('http://{s}.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/' + 'YOUR_MAPBOX_API_KEY' + '/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', { 
       attribution: 'Map data &copy; <a href="http://openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC-BY-SA</a>, Imagery © <a href="http://mapbox.com">Mapbox</a>',
       maxZoom: 18
   }).addTo(map);
 </script>
</body>
</html>

This gives us a nice map of Cardiff with the parish boundaries:

Cardiff parishes on a map

Cardiff parishes on a map

All we need to do now is alter the colour of our parishes based on the number of empty properties within that parish. So, we go back to the data we extracted preciously, which gave us the total number of empty properties in each parish. We can go back to our code that extracts the Cardiff parishes from the large geojson file, and this time whenever we extract a Cardiff parish, we add a property to the geoJson feature with its value from the empty properties data. We also add min and max values across the whole set of parishes:

import json
import pandas

parishes = json.load(open('Wales_Parish.geojson', 'r'))
cardiff_parishes = {'type': parishes['type'], 'crs': parishes['crs'], 'features': [], 'properties':{}}

parish_totals = pandas.read_csv('parish_totals.csv', index_col=0)

cardiff_parishes['properties']['min'] = parish_totals['value'].min()
cardiff_parishes['properties']['max'] = parish_totals['value'].max()

for feature in parishes['features']:
 if feature['properties']['LAD14CD'] == 'W06000015':
 
 parish_name = feature['properties']['PARNCP14NM'].strip().upper()
 feature['properties']['empty_total'] = parish_totals.loc[parish_name]['value']

 cardiff_parishes['features'].append(feature)
 
json.dump(cardiff_parishes, open('Cardiff_Parish.geojson', 'w'))

Then, we set up a colour scale in our JavaScript code for creating the map (based off a single-hue colorbrewer scale), and style each shape according to its value by adding a style function that gets called by Leaflet when it is drawing each geoJson feature:

<script>
 // create map and centre on Cardiff
 var map = L.map('map').setView([51.455, -3.19], 12);

 var divisor = parishes.properties.max / 9;
 var colour_scale = ["#fff7ec", "#fee8c8", "#fdd49e", "#fdbb84", "#fc8d59", "#ef6548", "#d7301f", "#b30000", "#7f0000"];

 L.geoJson(parishes, {
   style: function(feature){
     var colour = colour_scale[Math.round((feature.properties.empty_total/divisor)-1)];
     return {color: colour, fillOpacity: 0.4, weight: 2}
   }
 }).addTo(map);

 // add some mapbox tiles
 var tileLayer = L.tileLayer('http://{s}.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/' + 'YOUR_MAPBOX_API_KEY' + '/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', { attribution: 'Map data &copy; <a href="http://openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC-BY-SA</a>, Imagery © <a href="http://mapbox.com">Mapbox</a>', maxZoom: 18 }).addTo(map); </script>

And with a refresh of our map page, there we have a choropleth of the parishes in Cardiff, coloured by the number of empty properties:

Choropleth of empty properties in Cardiff

Choropleth of empty properties in Cardiff

This is a nice quick example that has allowed us to begin thinking about mapping data, and some of the issues surrounding such mappings, before we begin to study them it in detail next semester. As more of the data is returned from our FOI requests, we can start expanding this visualisation across Wales.