Michael Michael

How the Guardian Does DataJournalism

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:37:24 +0000

The Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs are a fantastic victory for investigative data basedjournalism, not only here at the Guardian but at the New York Times and Der Spiegel too.

It’s also datajournalism in action. What we wanted to do was enable our team of specialist reporters to get great human stories from the information – and we wanted to analyse it to get the big picture, to show how the war really is going.

It’s been a busy month for those of us who work with data at the Guardian; this is how we got here.

Peaceful Elections Come to Kenya

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:12:34 +0000

Via ReadWriteWeb:

Yesterday’s elections in Kenya are a story of triumph. The country, which had a terribly violent election season in 2007 turned in a sleek, peaceful set of returns this time. The referendum on a new constitution for the country returned a 67% yes vote. Why? In part, due to the real-time Web and mobile technology.

Humanities Academics Geek Out On Code

Michael Cervieri — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:41:53 +0000

Via ReadWriteWeb

This past week, a dozen scholars participated in the One Week One Tool workshop, organized by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Workshop participants were tasked with learning how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool – from inception to launch.

And the result of their work – Anthologize – launches today.

Anthologize enables anyone working with WordPress to easily publish their content in a variety of book formats, including PDF, ePUB, and TEI, an open XML format. Anthologize can handle WordPress blog content as well as feeds from other sources, allowing these items to be updated, reordered, and edited, and then exported.

Off -Line, I Reconnected

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:00:58 +0000

For those of us too connected, too often. Thoughts on a digital respite.

Via The Montreal Gazette:

A few months ago , I finally joined Facebook, on the advice of friends who thought it would better equip me to embrace the new millennium and enter the domain of "social networking." I am now among the 500 million-plus people around the planet who have subscribed. Problem is, when I moved into a new apartment last year, I declined to take the Internet with me.

Unhooking myself from the Net started as an experiment, after depending on it for work and recreation for nearly 20 years. If humans are basically creatures of habit, I wanted to know whether I could survive without being addicted to the World Wide Web.

Doing the NYC Subway Map Better

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:57:40 +0000

Via O’Reilly Radar:

Maps are one of the most basic data visualizations that we have; we've been making them for millennia. But we still haven't perfected them as a tool for understanding complex systems — and with 26 lines and 468 stations across five boroughs, the New York City subway system certainly is complex. The KickMap is the result of my quest to design a more effective subway map, and ultimately to encourage increased ridership.

IBM Visualises the CIA

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:55:28 +0000

Via Download Squad:

If you love data visualization, this one's going to blow your mind.

[The datavisualization] basically takes a ton of demographic and economic data (from the CIA World Factbook, I presume) and presents it in several beautiful ways that (mostly) make instant sense.

This is one of those rare cases where screenshots simply would not do, so I rolled up my sleeves and took the World Factbook Dashboard for a whirlwind ten-minute video tour with some really funny moments and lots of interesting facts and figures.

Microsoft’s Street Slide, Better Than Google Street View

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:50:49 +0000

Via ReadWriteWeb:

Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the technology allows users to zoom out from the fish-eye pannable photos you see on standard street view options and instead see a series of flat panoramic photos stitched together like a timeline.

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

Wikileaks Afghanistan: What the NYT Says

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:25:28 +0000

Via the NY Times:

Over all these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction…

…The documents — some 92,000 individual reports in all — were made available to The Times and the European news organizations by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds, on the condition that the papers not report on the data until July 25, when WikiLeaks said it intended to post the material on the Internet. WikiLeaks did not reveal where it obtained the material. WikiLeaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing. The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. The three news organizations agreed to publish their articles simultaneously, but each prepared its own articles.

Leakage: Wikileaks Has a Plan

Michael Cervieri — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:23:40 +0000

Via Computer World:

Wikileaks.org, the online clearinghouse for leaked documents, is working on a plan to make the Web leakier by enabling newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an "upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks" form onto their Web sites.

The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy…

…Once Wikileaks confirms the uploaded material is real, it will be handed over to the Web site that encouraged the submission for a period of time. This embargo period gives the journalist or rights group time to write a news story or report based on the material.

7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs

Michael Cervieri — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:27:33 +0000

Via Flowing Data:

Charts and graphs have found their way into news, presentations, and comics, with users from art to design to statistics. The design principles for these data graphics will vary depending on what you're using it for. Making something for a presentation? You'll want to keep it extremely simple and avoid using a lot of text. Designing a graphic for a newspaper? You'll have to deal with size constraints and try to explain the important parts of your graphic.

However, whatever you're making your charts and graphs for, whether it be for a report, an infographic online, or a piece of data art, there are a few basic rules that you should follow.