This is a short week, with only one class. We’ll mostly be getting to know one another and getting up to speed with Google Drive and Slack. By Sunday night, you need to have introduced yourself on Slack and written your first Data Diary entry. For Tuesday in class, you need to come prepared with some links for your Wikipedia article.
On Tuesday, we wrapped up our NYTimes data collection, discussed chapter 1 of Numbers in the Newsroom, and talked through the wikipedia authoring process. Thursday class was cancelled.
Wikipedia entries are due Monday at midnight.
By Tuesday, I’d like you to have read Numbers in the Newsroom through the section “Going further with changes” (where through means you read that section but you don’t need to go beyond), and Data Organization in Spreadsheets. We’ll be starting to interview a spreadsheet during our Zoom meeting.
On Tuesday, we discussed the process of Wikipedia authoring, broke down some pieces of a story, talked about the news (and how it related to the Numbers in the Newsroom piece), and started interviewing our spreadsheet.
For Thursday, you should do the following:
Read this article on interviewing, and compare/contrast with the infographic I showed in the last class about starting a data analysis.
Your one-number stories are due Monday at midnight. As always, you should be completing four data diaries for the week.
For Tuesday, I would like you to read the following:
For Thursday, I would like you to read:
You have a few things due on Monday this week:
You also need to do some reading:
For Monday, you need to finish your one-variable visualization. Upload it to Moodle or send me a link on Slack. You should be working on your Science Reporting, and trying to find a time to interview your faculty member. We’ll keep talking about data visualization (read the selections linked below), and also explore a few new technologies: OpenRefine and Tabula.
I’m not making any writing due on Monday. But, please come to class with your csv of data from the Freeing Data from PDFs exercise, and be prepared to work with git and GitHub (instructions are linked on the same page). This will require you to make a GitHub username, install git, and install a git client (optional, but recommended). I would also like you to install OpenRefine (linked at the top of moodle) for data wrangling.
You also need to do some reading.
Over spring break, you should be thinking about your Science Reporting (due March 26), and working on your Standard Story (due March 19, right when we get back). I’d also like you to try working through some of the [redacted] activities I assigned. There are no data dairies due for break.
This is going to be a pretty light week. On Tuesday, we’re visiting the College Archives. You don’t need to do anything to prepare for that.
We’re starting to think about programming now. You should be finishing up those DataCamp courses. We’re also considering polling data! For Thursday, I’d like you to read
Based on the initial feedback from the mid-semester assessment, we’re going to take a bit of a step back on Tuesday and talk more about journalism and writing. There is no writing assignment due on Monday. However, I would like you to complete your [redacted] courses (or, if they are all review, choose a different course to work through) and submit another pull request for your cleaned-up BLL data. Reading for Tuesday:
Reading for Thursday:
This week, we’re thinking about algorithms. We’ve been discussing them throughout the course because they’ve been in the news a lot, but now we’ll turn our focus there more directly. For Tuesday, I would like you to read the following:
For Thursday, read:
On Tuesday, I’d like us to think about timelines in data journalism. I think these can either be written or visual, although most of them blend elements of both. Please read:
Thursday, we’ll be hosting Rachel Schutt, who will be on campus for a talk later in the day. I’d like you to come with some questions for her. These can be about her career path, advice for students, work she’s done, etc. Rachel has done a ton of interesting stuff in her life. She coauthored a book called Doing Data Science with Cathy O’Neil, who wrote Weapons of Math Destruction. She was chief data scientist at News Corp, and is now a managing director at BlackRock. Both those places are major organizations, and not without controversy. I often talk to people about whether they should try to work for companies whose mission they totally believe in, or try to be a force for good in a place that might not be the most admirable. It seems to me that Rachel has chosen to do the latter, which is really interesting and probably hard!
I’d like you to research Rachel for yourself. The News resources on the library website could be a good place to look (maybe try Nexis Uni). Here are a few links to get you started:
This week, we’ll be thinking about interactivity in journalism. I think we can continue to consider many of the pieces I brought in last week, because they all have interactive elements. In addition to those, I’d like you to look at the following: