A very great day today. Or let’s say: The combination of yesterday and today was quite excellent. Yesterday I worked and then went to the data vis meetup. Today I visited John Muyskens at the Washington Post, then briefly went by my favourite section in the National Portrait Gallery, then attended a Data Vis Workshop for demographers organized by the Population Association of America, then spoke with people from DataKind and people who make software for spy satellites at a Data Vis drinks event and then went to eat Ramen with a friend. Both days were similar to how I would spent my days in Berlin. I biked around. I met friends. I visited meetups on both days (meaning, I go to meetups frequently). I ate out. I came home between 9 and 11pm. Very, very nice.
The highlight of my day was definitely the conversation with John and seeing the Washington Post Graphics team from the inside. John mentioned that there is no Data Journalism meetup in DC and that the Hacks/Hackers meetup here is not organized frequently. Apparently, the last Hacks/Hackers meetups were in February 2016, and in 2015 in December, August, July, April and February again. So five times a year? Maybe that’s enough? I actually believe in monthly meetups. Let’s see. But organising a meetup, or at least starting one, here in DC, is not the worst idea I’ve had so far.
Input? 7
Output? 4
Learnings?
People I talk to like NPR because they report more nuanced, less biased and therefore don’t make bad news seem so bad.
“Bias” in journalism includes your selection of what you want to report on.
If you want to apply more “math” / statistics skills to your data, then you also need more effort to explain the math to your audience. Eg if you’re calculating the variance, then you need to explain what that is and what you did there.
Using data vis for a quick analysis implies high frequency and low effort. Using data vis to communicate to the public means low frequency and high effort.
Questions?
What happened to Hacks/Hackers DC?
What would a Data Journalism meetup in DC achieve in its best case?
How do demographers work, exactly? Seems to be a quiet interesting field.
Best pun today?
“I have this chart here, and I normally start the y-axis at 0, but in this case I want to start it at 30%. But I’ve never done that before, so it’s definitely uncharted territory for me.”