Computational & Data Journalism @ Cardiff

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Journalism by Numbers — 2019 [Virtual] Summer School

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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 rapid run-through the data journalism world, we touched on classic go-to number stories like A&E waiting times and party-political donations as well as how journalists dig up the data in the first place (FOI, web scraping and so on). We looked at visuals done with colouring pencils, graphing cleaner air in Cardiff during lockdown and the ongoing questions around who keeps an eye on the algorithms.

People appeared online for our Journalism by Numbers workshop from around Wales and the UK, but also from Pakistan, Sweden and Nigeria.

Other workshops during the week covered ethics in Artificial Intelligence, copywriting and Google analytics. There was also a session on the ever-interesting Pharmabee project (which launched the Spot-a-bee app this year as part of their bee-mapping project).

SELECT * FROM a day of SQL…

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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 looked for newslines in a sqlite database of US babynames (via the command line) and wrote queries in Carto to map a dataset of protected Welsh monuments.

There was more sqlite with a database of shooting incidents involving Dallas police officers, this time via a notebook. And we finished with the Knight Center’s fine SQL-based murder mystery.

Enough there to get you started (or refreshed) with your SQL syntax.

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 😉