Rick Harrison – Harvest

Tools, Events, Courses

Spring is the season of data journalism events in Europe, and if you’ve missed the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, you’d better avoid repeating mistakes and register for the Dataharvest+ Conference, which will take place in Brussels this weekend and will gather data specialists and coders from all over the continent.

Visualize is a 96-hour workshop on data journalism and data visualization promoted by the association GliAdditivi. The event will take place in Lecce, Italy, and will last from May 8 to June 18. Special guest: John Grimwade.

Data Stories

Paul Bradshaw on data journalism is always a point of view worth reading. Recently on his Online Journalism Blog, he had fun in comparing the emerging #ddj journalist communities to three different animals according to their different skills: unicorns, racehorses, and mules.

Thomas Piketty’s latest book “Capital in the 21^st Century” is surely among the most influential ones in the US. On Quandl.com/PIKETTY it is possible to download and look into the 75 datasets used by the author to conduct his analysis.

Every year, the American NGO Freedom House releases its report on the state of the art of press freedom in the world. Leila Haddou extracted the data and published an article on it on the Guardian Data Blog.

The World Bank is encouraging both countries and private actors to share and spread data at their disposal in order to create new social and economic opportunities. In its last spring meeting “Talking about a Data Revolution”, experts and observers discussed the role that open data may play for countries’ development.

What are the main trends in the cost of living in UK and the US? Which prices increased and which ones diminished since the beginning of the economic crises? The Financial Times posted a short article which offers an interesting perspective on how poverty has changed in the two countries.

Data Sources

Freelancing is a widespread activity among journalists both offline and online. If you are new to this world and you need to know how to measure the value of the article you’ve written or the video interview you’ve conducted, take a minute to read “How do you cost your work as freelance”, again from the Online Journalism Blog.

On the Mu Lin Blog, it is possible to find a list of readings, tutorials, and resources all exclusively focused on data visualization.

The Datavizcatalogue is an ongoing project developed by Severino Ribecca which contains descriptions and details on every possible way to visualize data. I also recommend that you take a look at its suggested readings section.

One of the most promising and positive effects open data may have on societies is that it improves government transparency and helps identify cases of corruption. Europe’s Public Sector Information platform has released a report on this claim which is freely available on its website.