As a student exploring the world of data-driven storytelling for the first time this year, I have found the advice, experience and practice of others an invaluable aid.
At the beginning of the course when I felt my most overwhelmed, I created a Twitter list called The Digital Revolution. Here I added anybody working, experimenting with or simply tweeting about data, social media and online communities.
Below are the top ten individuals and organisations that have helped me improve my knowledge of the field of data journalism.
GuardianData (@GuardianData): the Twitter feed for the Guardian’s award-winning data store, Facts Are Sacred. In my view the Guardian are one of, if not the frontrunners in terms of pushing the boundaries when it comes to storytelling with data. Follow the updates here for their latest visualisations and data sets.
DataDrivenJournalism (@ddjournalism): the team behind Data Driven Journalism and The Data Journalism Handbook. Great for providing anybody keen to get started with helpful resources, tutorials and tips about upcoming events. You can join their mailing list too, as I have done, to keep up to date with developments in the community. They even tweet crazy visualisations like this one of data journalism books on Amazon.
Dont miss this awesome visualisation of 66 data journalism related books on Amazon done with Yasiv bit.ly/10way7O#ddj#dataviz
— DataDrivenJournalism (@ddjournalism) May 10, 2013
Simon Rogers (@smfrogers): aside from teaching me some invaluable Google Fusion skills in class, Simon is a great expert to follow on Twitter too. He launched the Guardian’s data store and will shortly be starting work in San Francisco as Twitter’s data editor. He should be producing some fascinating work with all that twittery data to play with.
Claire Miller (@clairemilleruk): a reporter for Media Wales since 2010 who describes herself as ‘data journalist, maths geek, feminist’. She runs the Wales Online data store, as well as her own blog, on which the latest post is her ‘Great Big List’ of ideas for Freedom of Information requests. In case her passion for the subject is remotely in doubt, there are 500 of them.
Online Journo Blog (@ojblog): the feed for Paul Bradshaw‘s Online Journalism Blog, full of useful posts, comments, analysis and bookmarks for those exploring, well, online journalism.
Last night I dreamt of a word cloud in the shape of the word SHRIMP. Welcome to my world…
— Paul Bradshaw (@paulbradshaw) May 10, 2013
helpmeinvestig8 (@helpmeinvestig8): a platform for open source investigative journalism, helping people and journalists wanting to investigate questions in the public interest. Launched in 2009, the Help Me Investigate website uncovers stories and information that have been used by a wide range of national news organisations. I am currently working on some torch relay data for their Olympics branch.
nicnewman (@nicnewman): Nic is an ex-BBC strategist and journalist following and commenting on the future of news. He tweets about everything from page rank to emerging social media tools to data, so is well worth a follow for an insight into the overall picture of digital journalism.
Data Stories Podcast (@datastories): the Twitter feed for the Data Stories visualisation podcast blog by Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner. They host regular podcasts with experts working in the field of data journalism, visualisation and development, with a handy chapters list so you can skip to the parts that interest you.
»Can data visualization save the world?« Great new episode with @krees & @jakeporway on doing good with data datastori.es/data-stories-2…
— DATA STORIES podcast (@datastories) April 14, 2013
Marianne Bouchart (@Maid_Marianne): a web producer and data journalism projects co-ordinator at Bloomberg News and an organiser of the brilliant HacksHackersLDN meet-ups, Marianne tweets about all things digital journalism and runs the Data Journalism Blog, providing how-to guides, interviews and news on emerging trends.
London Datastore (@londondatastore): a feed run by the Greater London Authority team, working on setting up London’s datastore so that everybody can access the huge supply of data available about our capital city. They post and retweet a shed-load of headlines about London-based data-driven stories that could lead to interesting follow-ups and visualisations.
Got any recommendations for my list? Please do share them in the comments below.
Filed under: Dataplay Tagged: Claire Miller, Data Driven Journalism, Data Stories, Guardian Datastore, Help Me Investigate, London Datastore, Marianne Bouchart, Nic Newman, Online Journalism Blog, Simon Rogers, Twitter
