Data Roundup, 5 March

March 5, 2014 in Data Roundup

Wally Gobetz – United Nations Headquarters

Tools, Events, Courses

Not all the data you are looking for are already formatted and uploaded on the Internet. Sometimes you have to extract them from multiple websites, and then scraping is the only answer to the problem. Morph.io allows you to write your own scraper in Python, PHP, or Ruby. Give it a try!

The NICAR 2014 conference ends today, but there is already a lot of material available online. Probably one of the best links is Chrys Wu’s list of slides, tutorials, and tools.

Data Stories

It is not a funny topic, but it surely stimulates curiosity, specifically that of the US citizens: take a look at Top Ten Causes of Death in the United States from Daily Infographic.

Selling and buying online is becoming the rule, they say. The Wall Street Journal states the contrary with this little piece of data journalism which shows the dimension of the two sides of the markets in absolute terms as well as percentages.

Maybe some of you have missed it, but you can still read Samuel Lee’s article on the World Bank Data Blog about the International Open Data Day in Washington D.C and the state of the art of the world of open data.

Currently Ukraine is on the cover page of every newspaper worldwide. If you know to want more about the main differences between its defense sector and that of Russia, you should see this infographic showing the two countries’ military power.

Moreover, you might also be interested in knowing more about the economic relations that Russia and the European countries maintain. On the BBC News website, you can find Russia’s trade ties with Europe; go and read it.

Data Sources

Thanks to the HDX platform developed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it is now possible to collect, share, and download data related to humanitarian crises in a much easier and faster way.

The big data job market is expanding, and so is the need for frequently updated job boards. Here you can find that of Source, which regularly publishes “job listings for people who design interactive features, write code, and sling data in newsrooms”.

This week we recommend that data lovers, information designers, and journalists take a look at newsvis.org, a well organized and useful collection of data visualizations of all kind from around the web.

Credits

Thanks to @SchoolOfData and @OpenDevToolkit

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