25 February 2015

This week your major task is going to be pitching your data driven story.

Pitches

In contrast to your community profile, your data driven story should be current and newsworthy and you only need 2-3 data sources.

A few examples under my wheelhouse tag, or Greg David’s Crains column, Claire Cain Miller’s Upshot posts on topics like the geography of unemployment and the role of gender in student evaluations. Look around at Five Thirty Eight. iQuant NY has some neat entries, that are closer than anything else to the length we’re looking for.

Work with a partner, post your pitch as a Gist and add the URL to the class assignments page.

Community Profile Data

We’re going to start playing with charting tools next week so keep working on getting data (not PDF images of data…) that you’ll use in your profile, and bring at least two tables that are already in spreadsheets to clagss.

Maps

Clean up your map. Check your quantification method (it should be “equal intervals”). Add tidy hover windows, give it a title and subtitle with some context and embed it in an HTML Gist. Add the URL to the class assignments page.

We didn’t actually experiment with HTML Gists this week, so here’s a rough walk through. If you get stuck, ask for help!

  • Create a new gist
  • Name it index.html (in the “name this file…”) box.
  • Use “Mapping Assignment 2” for the description, for now.
  • Find your Visualization on CartoDB. Use the Share button in the top right (if you see a Visualize button in the top right, you need to save your visualization before you can embed it.)
  • Copy the “Embed it” code and paste that code into your Gist.
  • Preview your work on http://bl.ocks.org/ – I can see all my public gists at http://bl.ocks.org/amandabee/ because my Git username is “amandabee.” For any private gist I can still preview it by replacing https://gist.github.com in the URL with http://bl.ocks.org, so that a gist URL like https://gist.github.com/amandabee/c0d104767b5eb4315dea becomes a Bl.ocks URL at http://bl.ocks.org/amandabee/c0d104767b5eb4315dea.




CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

© Spring 2015 Amanda Hickman