This post comes to you from Anna Sakoyan, who participated as a “Data Agent” the Data Explorer Mission, a partnership between Peer 2 Peer University and the Open Knowledge Foundation. The course ran from mid-April to mid-May, and primed Agents to analyze, clean, visualize data, tell a story with it, and facilitate their group. Here is [...]
As anyone who has tried working with “real world” data releases will know, sometimes the only place you can find a particular dataset is as a table locked up in a PDF document, whether embedded in the flow of a document, included as an appendix, or representing a printout from a spreadsheet. Sometimes it can [...]
Have data skills to share? Want to bring the School of Data to your community? We are currently looking for 12 Community Mentors as a pilot for our international network. As a Community Mentor you will: Offer constructive feedback for learners on projects (often within your own language region) Help to answer questions by learners [...]
The field of crisis mapping is relatively new, but its impact on the global response to conflict is already evident. By enabling massive amounts of information to be quickly understood by any interested party, crisis mapping increases public awareness on a exponential scale and, if properly put together, allows for quicker responses to crises. Invisible [...]
We’re rounding up data news from the web each week. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at schoolofdata@okfn.org. TOOLS, COURSES, AND EVENTS The World Wide Web Foundation and its partners (including the OKFN) have launched the Global Open Data Initiative, “a champion for Open Data globally”, aiming to create and [...]
Every so often I get asked the question: “so what is data journalism?” I’m still not sure I have a very good definition of it, but here are three different ways I think we can view it: as a particular sort of output – one of the easiest ways of responding to the question is [...]
Last year, DC Action for Children, in partnership with DataKind and a group of dedicated pro-bono data scientists, created an interactive, web-based tool to take traditional child well-being indicators “beyond the PDF book” and into the exciting realm of visualizing and communicating data for collective action. The neighborhood maps we created showed that the success [...]
Do you live in Latin America? Hungry for some School of Data materials in Spanish? We have some good news for you: The School of Data is going to come to you! Image CC-BY-SA Eric Fisher While our friends at Social-TIC are working hard on translating School of Data materials in Spanish, Michael Bauer and [...]
The latest from what we are up to at the School of Data. School of Data goes Spanish Next month, a couple of the team will be headed over to Latin America for a series of warm-up events for the launch of the Spanish version of School of Data. The School will be launched at [...]
We’re rounding up data news from the web each week. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at schoolofdata@okfn.org. Tools, Courses, and Events Booking now is the UK Data Service one-day workshop on using large-scale survey data for research which is in Manchester 24 June 2013. This workshop is aimed at those with little [...]
This week Michael Bauer has been traveling to give workshops in Prague, Barcelona and Accra. Training Data Skills with Civil Society Organizations and Journalists. He reports: With the coming of spring in Europe not only nature awakes. Suddenly the world is buzzing with workshops and interesting events. This means a lot of traveling and meeting [...]
Being able to spot when we might might be able to turn documents into datasets is a useful skill for any data journalist or watchdog to develop, In this (rather long!) practical walkthrough post, we’ll see how we can start to use OpenRefine to turn a set text based forms into data. Specifically, given a [...]
On May 25-26 almost 50 participants from several teams set out on a data expedition to map the garment factories. This is a report from the team comprised of Roy Keyes, Naomi Colvin, Sybern, Bhanupriya Rao and Daniela Mattern. The team used a crowdsourced database on garment factories to expose questionable standards and highlight the [...]
I am pleased to be joining the School of Data, where I will be focusing on how civil society organisations (CSOs) and advocacy groups are using data to pursue their mission, in the service of the public good – from greater election transparency, to alerting people in conflict zones to attacks, and reporting and advocacy [...]
As preparation for the upcoming data expedition on Mapping the garment factories this weekend, several intrepid explorers have been collating data from brand supplier lists that identify the location of over 3,000 factories to date. The data is being published via a Google Spreadsheet, which means we can also treat it as a database, asking [...]
Want to dig deep into tax avoidance and evasion? We have gathered a wide range of data on this sensitive topic and for one afternoon we we’ll guide you through some of the key decisions to think about when writing a story on the topics. With tax evasion and tax avoidance currently such a hot [...]
Data Roundups contain news on new apps, libraries, and other tools for working with data; newly announced conferences, workshops, hackathons, MOOCs, etc. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at schoolofdata@okfn.org. This week’s Data Roundup is brought to you by John Murtagh. Tools, Courses, and Events The Big Data in Biomedicine conference kicks off at Stanford [...]
Here’s the latest from this week at the School of Data. Never miss a post: Join the School of Data announce list for this bulletin delivered directly to you in your inbox. Data Expedition – Mapping the Garment Factories The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global [...]
This is a very quick introductory post to welcome Liliana Bounegru to the School of Data team. Liliana will be working part time with the School of Data team to source some of the shining case-studies of Civil Society Organisations working on data-driven campaigns that will change the world through turning data into evidence as [...]
The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global garment brands, as well their thousands of suppliers, into the spotlight. At School of Data we noted that corrupt and missing data were part of the story. Data on building permits in Bangladesh is largely unavailable due to lack of state [...]
A well targeted Freedom of Information request to the UK Department for Education and its consequent report hit the news here recently. It turns out that a claim by Minister for Education, Michael Gove, that “[s]urvey after survey has revealed disturbing historical ignorance” was largely based, either directly, or as a cynic might imagine, as [...]
We’re rounding up data news from the web each week. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at schoolofdata@okfn.org. TOOLS, COURSES, AND EVENTS In “the most significant piece of CKAN news since the project began”, version 2.0 of CKAN has been released. CKAN, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s flagship, has been updated [...]
In case you missed them, here are the latest updates from around the School of Data. New Ask and Answer Service You can now ask and answer data related questions at http://ask.schoolofdata.org/ Here’s a couple of the top questions from the last week – know an answer? This is the fastest way to get your answers. [...]
One of the great advantages of having a dataset available as data is that we can interrogate it in very direct way. In this post, we’ll see a variety of examples of how we can start to ask structured questions of a dataset. Although it’s easy for us to be seduced by the simple search [...]
A data journalism project by three Italian freelance journalists and developers shows the problem of journalists facing threats in Italy. More than 300 journalists have been facing threats in Italy in 2012. This is what emerges from the data journalism work by three Italian journalists and developers, Isacco Chiaf, Andrea Fama and Jacopo Ottaviani, who [...]
In every data explorer’s toolbox, there is likely to be a range of tools and techniques that have proven their worth again and again. For discovering data on the web, both the public web and private, or closed, corporate intranets, being able to read a URL is one of the backpocket tools we can make [...]
As our data exploration on carbon data draws near to the close – a voice from the Open Sustainability Group chimes in to another angle that may be interesting to explore when looking at greenhouse gas emissions.The following post was written by Adrien Labaeye. The public discussion on climate change has for long focused on [...]
We’re rounding up data news from the web each week. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at schoolofdata@okfn.org. TOOLS, COURSES, AND EVENTS “Data is hard. Really, really hard,” says Dan Sinker, “[and] one of the hardest parts is cleaning.” That’s why OpenNews is announcing two code sprints for data cleaning. [...]
Ever got stuck in a dataproject and found no way out? Ever wondered if there is an efficient way to transform some dataset you work with? Looked for someone to ask these questions? Look no longer: Ask School of Data! At the School of Data we aim to create a community of learning and sharing [...]
If the role of news journalists is in part to hold the powers that be to account, whose role is to make sure that claimed releases of public open data are fit for purpose, or that appropriately licensed data is available for civic public use? With local elections coming round again in the UK (Full [...]
We’re rounding up data news from the web each week. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at schoolofdata@okfn.org. TOOLS, COURSES, AND EVENTS If you missed out on the School of Data’s “School of Data Journalism 2013” workshop at the International Journalism Festival, don’t let that stop you from learning from [...]
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