Data always confess
Preparing your data for a media story is a a tricky and complex task, often quite different from what scientifc researchers do.
«If you torture them long enough, data always confess» was the mantra of one omy statistics professors in College. The ones feeling on the waterboard, I should say, where much more often his students, but the line keeps popping up when I collect and assemble a dataset for a story.
Preparing your data for a media story is a a tricky and complex task, often quite different from what scientifc researchers do. Sometimes it's smooth and quick, some others it's a real pain.
Marc McCormick and others from Guardian's DataBlog have summarized what thety do to their data before readers see them. This is worth showing as it's a useful blueprint of the steps to take in working your data.
The Guardian team, who presented wonderful things at the Festival di Perugia, is also opening up its toolkit reavealing some goodies in their Open Platform. As for iData, although we don't have the same resources, we're not sitting still.
Here's a first round of tool benchmarking completed by Elisabetta Tola (twitter) for the project.
This blog will come back on single tools and how to use them. Comments on these and others are very welcome.
