What’s involved in creating a data-centric story?
Says Simon Rogers of The Guardian:
It’s really 90% perspiration. There’s a whole process to making the data work and getting to a position where you can get stories out of it. It goes like this:
- We locate the data or receive it from a variety of sources — from breaking news stories, government data, journalists’ research and so on.
- We then start looking at what we can do with the data. Do we need to mash it up with another dataset? How can we show changes over time?
- Spreadsheets often have to be seriously tidied up — all those extraneous columns and weirdly merged cells really don’t help. And that’s assuming it’s not a PDF, the worst format for data known to humankind.
- Now we’re getting there. Next up we can actually start to perform the calculations that will tell us if there’s a story or not.
- At the end of that process is the output. Will it be a story or a graphic or a visualisation? What tools will we use?
Read the full piece at radar.oreilly.com
