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Mapping

This category contains 13 posts

US Census bonus podcast episode

Tomorrow (August 12) sees the release of crucial US Census redistricting data – which will shape US government and politics for the next crucial election cycles. It will also give us unique insights into the changing demographic makeup of regions across the US. Alberto and Simon chat with Joe Germuska (executive director at @KnightLab and … Continue reading

Mapping live George Floyd protest videos

Recreating live news events online is hard – but bringing them to life so you canfeel them is harder. Just published by the Washington Post and designed by The Pudding (and supported by my team at the Google News Initiative), this visual joins together Google Earth studio animations and places YouTube live videos on location … Continue reading

A new free online course in Data Journalism

Just launched: a new free online course produced with the Knight Center for Journalism for anyone wanting to learn how to do data journalism with free tools. I get to teach the introduction and welcome you to the course, along with the great Alberto Cairo and a fabulous set of teachers, including: Debra Anderson, Duncan … Continue reading

US election 2016: How to download county-level results data

If open data means anything, it applies to elections. But yet here we are, a week after the results, and open data around the results is hard to find. It matters because having that data allows us to understand the results better, and what they say about America today. It also means that the data can … Continue reading

A data journalist at Twitter

In 2013, as I was about to start at Twitter, Alex Howard wrote a piece pondering on just what a data journalist would do at a tech company. Now, as I’m about to begin a new adventure, I thought I should collect together a selection of the projects worked on with some amazing developers and others … Continue reading

Ebola in charts: data journalism and the outbreak

It’s a crisis unparalleled in modern times: the biggest outbreak of Ebola ever recorded. So, what do we know about it? Data journalism is about taking the key data, breaking it down and making it accessible. So a major story like this is where getting the data can help us understand it better. So what data … Continue reading

Taking maps to the edge

We published an interactive map this week showing the world’s response to Typhoon Haiyan earlier this year. Click on a link and it shows combinations of the word “help” (in 22 languages) with terms around the disaster. The lines symbolically represent the flood of response going from each continent around the world to the Philippines. … Continue reading

John Snow, data journalist

First published on the Guardian Datablog How often does a map change the world? In 1854, one produced by Doctor John Snow, altered it forever. In the world of the 1850s, cholera was believed to be spread by miasma in the air, germs were not yet understood and the sudden and serious outbreak of cholera … Continue reading

CartoDB v Google Fusion: how to map every meteorite

Javier at CartoDB has made this rather lovely video showing how CartoDB provides a nice visual interface for the Meteorites data we posted on the site on Friday. It works too – I’ve just reproduced his work in about five mins, although I’m not keen on having to get into SQL, you can do the … Continue reading

Mapping the census: how we did it (in three steps)

The Census is one of those data exercises that brings out the best and worst in day-to-day data journalism. The best is the access to lovely very granular data which can allow you to interrogate an area in detail. The worst is the amount of mucking around you have to do with the data just … Continue reading

About me

Data journalist, writer, speaker. Author of 'Facts are Sacred', published by Faber & Faber and a new range of infographics for children books from Candlewick. Data editor at Google, California. Formerly at Twitter, San Francisco. Created the Guardian Datablog. All opinions on this site are mine, not my employers'. Read more >>

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