Building your own data set

AmyJo Brown (War Streets Media)

The video explores how to build a dataset and analyze it with a series of DH tools from the perspective of journalism. It covers database building skills such as mapping data structures, choosing between manual versus optical character recognition assisted data entry, and keeping a data dictionary. It also discusses visualizing data such as with the tool Tableau.

Further Reading and Resources

The New York Times spreadsheet training kit. Includes tip sheets about editing your data and brainstorming stories from it. About the kit: https://open.nytimes.com/how-we-helped-our-reporters-learn-to-love-spreadsheets-adc43a93b919 Training materials: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1ZS57_40tWuIB7tV4APVMmTZ-5PXDwX9w

The Data Journalism Handbook: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462989511/the-data-journalism-handbook

Data Wrangling with Python: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032861.do

Creating a workflow for a project (especially with multiple stakeholders): https://source.opennews.org/articles/5-digital-workflow/

How to get things done (as a one-person show): https://source.opennews.org/articles/lonely-newsroom-coder/

July 3, 2019. Open Data, Text Mining and Analytics, Corpus Linguistics, Digital Forensics, Stylometry

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AmyJo Brown (War Streets Media)

AmyJo Brown’s excitement for city and county budgets, committee meetings and dusty shelves of public records is matched only by her happiness in the day’s first cup of coffee. An editor with more than 15 years experience as an investigative journalist, she is the principal and founder of War Streets Media, an information design firm that offers expertise in data and other nonfiction storytelling.