1.2 - Data types, and a letter to your future self

Thursday, January 16

In every project you have at least one other collaborator: future-you. You don’t want future-you to curse past-you.

Hadley Wickham

Class outline

• Ethics and accuracy in data journalism part one
• Introducing the data diary
• Understanding data types: numbers, dates and text

UPDATE 1/14

• Lab: An Excel reboot using a city budget, to be submitted in Canvas at the end of class data file | tutorial
• Demo: Calculating speeds from dates and times using 25,000 of the Sun-Sentinel’s 72,000 records data file | source

Due this week

• Friday: Academic integrity pledge on Canvas; download and sign into the Slack workspace for your section, linked off of My ASU.
• Sunday, Jan. 19: Finding stories in Arizona Census data: assignment | tutorial | data, with data diary, on Canvas.

Preparation

• “The Myth of the Machine”, by Mike Berens, now of Reuters. It’s a chapter Poynter’s 1999 review of computer assisted reporting, “When Nerds and Words Collide” (reproduced with permission).

• “Challenges of Data Journalism” section from Diving into Data Journalism by Samantha Sunne, American Press Institute, 2016 (You only need to read that section. The chapters aren’t well marked.)

• Replication and the data diary
  • An example data diary. (I updated some of the links, but the data description is actually from 2017)
  • An example data diary from the budget exercise that goes through what was done before you got it.
• Understanding data types:

• “An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors - now you know how it happens.

• Part 1 of the Sun-Sentinel’s award-winning project on speeding cops: “Cops among Florida’s worst Speeders, Sun-Sentinel Investigation Finds”, by Sally Kestin and John Maines, Feb. 11, 2012 (2013 Pulitzer Prize winner).

OPTIONAL:

Slides from the 2017 NICAR conference on ethics in data journalism, Mary Jo Webster (Minneapolis Star Tribune) and Tom McGinty (Wall Street Journal). Much of this is about accuracy and context, but there are good items on scraping and terms of service, which are important to us. You will need an IRE membership to sign in and get this tipsheet.