68 posts tagged “data-journalism”
2022
Measuring traffic during the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival
This weekend was the 50th annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival.
[... 2,693 words]Getting tabular data from unstructured text with GPT-3: an ongoing experiment (via) Roberto Rocha shows how to use a carefully designed prompt (with plenty of examples) to get GPT-3 to convert unstructured textual data into a structured table.
2021
git-history: a tool for analyzing scraped data collected using Git and SQLite
I described Git scraping last year: a technique for writing scrapers where you periodically snapshot a source of data to a Git repository in order to record changes to that source over time.
[... 2,002 words]Stanford School Enrollment Project (via) This is Project Pelican: I’ve been working with the Big Local News team at Stanford helping bundle up and release the data they’ve been collecting on school enrollment statistics around the USA. This Datasette instance has data from 33 states for every year since 2015—3.3m rows total. Be sure to check out the accompanying documentation!
Weeknotes: sqlite-transform 1.1, Datasette 0.58.1, datasette-graphql 1.5
Work on Project Pelican inspires new features and improvements across a number of different projects.
[... 1,419 words]The Accountability Project Datasettes. The Accountability Project “curates, standardizes and indexes public data to give journalists, researchers and others a simple way to search across otherwise siloed records”—they have a wide range of useful data, and they’ve started experimenting with Datasette to provide SQL access to a subset of the information that they have collected.
Weeknotes: Datasette and Git scraping at NICAR, VaccinateCA
This week I virtually attended the NICAR data journalism conference and made a ton of progress on the Django backend for VaccinateCA (see last week).
[... 773 words]Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk
I prepared a lightning talk about Git scraping for the NICAR 2021 data journalism conference. In the talk I explain the idea of running scheduled scrapers in GitHub Actions, show some examples and then live code a new scraper for the CDC’s vaccination data using the GitHub web interface. Here’s the video.
[... 289 words]2020
nyt-2020-election-scraper. Brilliant application of git scraping by Alex Gaynor and a growing team of contributors. Takes a JSON snapshot of the NYT’s latest election poll figures every five minutes, then runs a Python script to iterate through the history and build an HTML page showing the trends, including what percentage of the remaining votes each candidate needs to win each state. This is the perfect case study in why it can be useful to take a “snapshot if the world right now” data source and turn it into a git revision history over time.
selenium-wire. Really useful scraping tool: enhances the Python Selenium bindings to run against a proxy which then allows Python scraping code to look at captured requests—great for if a site you are working with triggers Ajax requests and you want to extract data from the raw JSON that came back.
Develomentor podcast: Simon Willison – Data Journalism, The Importance of Side Projects (via) Grant Ingersoll interviewed me for the Develomentor podcast. We talked about my career so far, and how much of it was driven by side-projects that I've worked on individually or with Natalie.
Here's the mp3, or access it through Buzzsprout.
sba-loans-covid-19-datasette (via) The treasury department released a bunch of data on the Covid-19 SBA Paycheck Protection Program Loan recipients today—I’ve loaded the most interesting data (the $150,000+ loans) into a Datasette instance.
Data Journalism Academy (via) MaryJo Webster is the data editor for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, and a 2019 Pulitzer nominee. She’s has a huge amount of experience teaching data journalism and has just released her accumulated teaching materials in the form of the Data Journalism Academy.
Weeknotes: Covid-19, First Python Notebook, more Dogsheep, Tailscale
My covid-19.datasettes.com project publishes information on COVID-19 cases around the world. The project started out using data from Johns Hopkins CSSE, but last week the New York Times started publishing high quality USA county- and state-level daily numbers to their own repository. Here’s the change that added the NY Times data.
[... 993 words]Weeknotes: datasette-ics, datasette-upload-csvs, datasette-configure-fts, asgi-csrf
I’ve been preparing for the NICAR 2020 Data Journalism conference this week which has lead me into a flurry of activity across a plethora of different projects and plugins.
[... 834 words]Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run
I’m using the combination of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Run to retrieve data from the U.S. Department of Justice FARA website and deploy it as a queryable API using Datasette.
[... 1,599 words]2019
Building tools to bring data-driven reporting to more newsrooms. I wrote about my fellowship project so far and my goals for the next few months for the JSK Medium publication. My next priority: an invite-only hosted version for newsrooms so that figuring out how to install and manage the software isn’t the biggest barrier to entry.
Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a git repo
PG&E have cut off power to several million people in northern California, supposedly as a precaution against wildfires.
[... 868 words]My JSK Fellowship: Building an open source ecosystem of tools for data journalism
I started a new chapter of my career last week: I began a year long fellowship with the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford.
[... 876 words]Los Angeles Weedmaps analysis (via) Ben Welsh at the LA Times published this Jupyter notebook showing the full working behind a story they published about LA’s black market weed dispensaries. I picked up several useful tricks from it—including how to load points into a geopandas GeoDataFrame (in epsg:4326 aka WGS 84) and how to then join that against the LA Times neighborhoods GeoJSON boundaries file.
JSK Journalism Fellowships names Class of 2019-2020 (and I’m in it!) (via) In personal news... I’ve been accepted for a ten month journalism fellowship at Stanford (starting September)! My work there will involve “Improving the impact of investigative stories by expanding the open-source ecosystem of tools that allows journalists to share the underlying data”.
VisiData
(via)
Intriguing tool by Saul Pwanson: VisiData is a command-line "textpunk utility" for browsing and manipulating tabular data. pip3 install visidata and then vd myfile.csv (or .json or .xls or SQLite or others) and get an interactive terminal UI for quickly searching through the data, conducting frequency analysis of columns, manipulating it and much more besides. Two tips for if you start playing with it: hit gq to exit, and hit Ctrl+H to view the help screen.
Generating a commit log for San Francisco’s official list of trees
San Francisco has a neat open data portal (as do an increasingly large number of cities these days). For a few years my favourite file on there has been Street Tree List, a list of all 190,000 trees in the city maintained by the Department of Public Works.
[... 1,051 words]Publish the data behind your stories with SQLite and Datasette. I presented a workshop on Datasette at the IRE and NICAR CAR 2019 data journalism conference yesterday. Here’s the worksheet I prepared for the tutorial.
socrata2sql (via) Phenomenal new open source tool released by Andrew Chavez at the Dallas Morning News. Socrata is the open data portal software used by huge numbers of local governments worldwide. socrata2sql is a tool that interacts with the standard Socrata API and can use it to suck down a dataset and save it as a SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL or other SQLAlchemy-supported database. I just tried this and it took a single command to create a SQLite database of every police arrest in Dallas in the past five years.
2018
Helicopter accident analysis notebook (via) Ben Welsh worked on an article for the LA Times about helicopter accident rates, and has published the underlying analysis as an extremely detailed Jupyter notebook. Lots of neat new (to me) notebook tricks in here as well.
How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette
I spoke about my Datasette project at PyBay in August and they’ve just posted the video of my talk.
[... 58 words]Django Bakery (via) “A set of helpers for baking your Django site out as flat files”. Released by the LA Times Data Desk, who use it for a large number of projects from election results to data journalism interactives. Statically publishing these projects to S3 lets them handle huge traffic spikes at a very low cost.
Notes from my appearance on the Changelog podcast
After I spoke at Zeit Day SF last weekend I sat down with Adam Stacoviak to record a 25 minute segment for episode 296 of the Changelog podcast, talking about Datasette. We covered a lot of ground!
[... 536 words]Baltimore Sun Public Salary Records (via) The Baltimore Sun have published an interactive search engine for public salaries of Maryland state employees, and it’s powered by Datasette! Since data journalism is one of my key use-cases for Datasette I’m incredibly excited to see this in the wild. They’ve also published the underlying source code (see the via link) which is a really nice example of how to use Datasette’s custom templates and canned query functionality.