Wonderful data journalism.  Look how southern California calls Colorado (where many residents from CA migrated to in the 90s and aughts), New England calls Florida (I live here and I don’t know what that’s about, but that might be because I don’t have my AARP card yet); and, most touchingly, how Louisiana and Alabama call Michigan.  Many African-Americans migrated from the south to Detroit in the 40’s and 50’s, paving the way for Motown City. 

jtotheizzoe:

The Connected States of America

Are our borders really the edges of our communities? The “internet guy” in me says “of course not” but that doesn’t really take into account how much of our day-to-day interaction takes place in geographical meatspace. But on the other hand, many of America’s state borders are very arbitrary delineations of latitude or since-bridged rivers, so how meaningful are they in 2013, really? 

What would our borders and communities look like if we looked at other data, like phone calls? At Krulwich Wonders…, Robert Krulwich has taken a look at a couple of alternate “neighborhoods”.

The photo above was assembled from anonymous mobile phone data by MIT’s Xiaoji Chen, and it which regions call each other the most often. Anyone who’s been to my neck of the woods in Austin knows that Texans don’t call people in Oklahoma much (or College Station, for that matter), and the NorCal/SoCal split shows that the differences there go beyond suntans and dotcoms. And people in the Plains apparently just want to call anyone they can that doesn’t live in the Plains.

“What’s it like out there? Just grass here.”

Check out the rest of Robert’s post for more phone fun, plus a little look at how (not) far our money travels (and what that says about us).

(via NPR)

SchoolCuts.org tries to answer: What if...?

THIS IS GOOD GOOD WORK.

wbezdata:

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has marked 129 elementary schools for possible closure based on utilization and performance. Closing a school is a very disruptive decision, affecting student outcomes, parental confidence, and neighborhood stability. In addition to showing the data being used by CPS, this website aims to help school leaders, parents, and communities learn more about the schools being considered, and what options will be available in case of closures.

daniel sinker: OpenNews: Code Sprints in 2013

sinker:

Back at the Hacks/Hackers Media Party in Buenos Aires, I announced the creation of Code Sprints—funding opportunities to build open-sourced tools for journalism. We used Code Sprints to fund a collaboration between WNYC in New York and KPCC in Southern California to build a parser for…

Source/Open News is getting *really* interesting. 

Vega: A "Visualization Grammar" for D3.js

Vega lets you automatically generate visualizations by editing a JSON file with the data. 

He Said/She Said, Now With Charts & Graphs: CTA, Sun-Times get in data fight

wbezdata:

By Elliott Ramos

Chicago Transit Authority president Forrest Claypool had some biting words for the Chicago Sun-Times — on its own pages.

On Thursday, the CTA chief penned a letter to the editor, chastising the newspaper’s article on CTA crime that ran on Tuesday.

On Monday…

Read this, it’s amazing. 

The Tow Center's Data Journalism Resources

journalistic-computing:

A collection of online data journalism resources compiled by the Tow Center. 

Paging @emilybell

patricksweet:

#NICAR13 is already paying off. Thanks to a few sessions from a few brilliant people, I decided to try using R to evaluate bail data. Unfortunately, all these boxplots show me is that our data was screwed up when they changed the field type in 2004, which is just another fun problem to solve…

Since I’m in DC today I’m featuring great data journalism from The Washington Post.  Here’s a history of tax breaks. 

Longer Life Expectancy -- More years of disability?

Since I’m in Washington, DC today, let’s feature some great data journalism from The Washington Post.  Why not, right?

onaissues:

My sense is that most journalists who’ve worked with a spreadsheet — knowingly, or unconsciously — kind of “get” the concepts… However, where the conceptual meets the practical, there can be some bumpy landings. 

Phillip Smith, a digital publishing consultant, provides great tips for journalists working with spreadsheets and databases to improve the way they handle data in How Journalists Can Think Like Programmers | PBS.

clearheadme:

I always love to see examples that demonstrate faulty data visualization. in this post, Sayf Sharif not only points out that Twain apparently made up that Disraeli used the phrase,” lies, damned lies, and statistics,” but he lays out some great examples of misleading data visualizations.

-Tim

idlethink:

beautiful, scary visualization of the complex and sensitive reasons why convictions for rape in the UK are so low. extrapolate in worse directions for less progressive countries. via @infoisbeautiful. all related data, sources and extra information here.

villageunderground:

http://bit.ly/12tnLDG A list of data vis tools via Alison Gow February 16, 2013 at 03:01PM

sunlightcities:

The Open Data Census is aiming to track the state of open data globally. Learn more about this project at the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.

HMMMMM

Freeing the Plum Book - NYTimes.com

journo-geekery:

Colleague Derek Willis writes up how the mobile edition of the US federal government’s annual publication of appointments helped him create a streamlined public JSON dataset, “mak[ing] a profound difference to [a specific Times] article, providing a more complete picture and dramatically reducing research time”.