Simon Rogers
How to guides
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
Can data journalism be taught?
There’s no shortage of advice on teaching journalism students. If you believe what you read, young reporters need to learn to code; not to learn to code; learn history of the internet (the flowchart above is from there), or the ‘technologies of the web‘. The fact that there’s so much discussion is easy to understand: it’s the traditional curse of … Continue reading
How to make a multi-screen interactive
Sometimes you’ll want to join more than one map, chart or other visual together — but if you’re not a developer it can be a little tricky. This is where the iframe scaffolder by Paris-based developer from Journalism++ Pierre Romera comes in. I made this map — used by Mother Jones — using the tool, which made it simple to … Continue reading
The five Ws of data journalism
This is taken from materials for an introduction to data journalism, a MOOC course run earlier this year. You can read more about the course here. 1) Who? Where did the data come from? Why does this matter? This could be the most important W. Because data, like any kind of information, can be wrong … Continue reading
How to make an animated map with CartoDB and Torque
If you want to make an animated map (and you’re not a coder), there are not a lot of options out there. CartoDB is the best. You can use it to make rather gorgeous choropleths but it excels at mapping large numbers of points. That makes it perfect for mapping Tweets — and I used … Continue reading
How to make a data journalism animation: women and equality
This video is the latest project I’ve done with Mariana Santos. It was published this weekend for International Women’s Day — the theme of which this year was inequality. We decided to focus on some of the reasons why, even in 2014, women are still losing this particular game. Mariana and I have made a … Continue reading
Chart: A data journalism workflow – translated into different languages
The Data Journalism workflow was originally designed by Guardian graphic artist Mark McCormick to illustrate our work on the Datablog. It’s since found its way into talks, presentations and the Data Journalism Handbook. Now it’s been translated by reporters around the world. This is all I’ve found so far – have you seen more (and … Continue reading
Data journalism: a video guide to its practice and history
As part of the work behind the release of Facts are Sacred, we have produced some videos about data journalism, how we do it and its history. Scroll down to view What is data journalism? A history of data journalism at The Guardian Data journalism and the Olympics
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
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Simon Rogers