Recap

• Always be suspicious of summary statistics
  • What is the underlying distribution?
  • Has the structure of the data changed?
  • What is being compared?
• Don’t be afraid to google or ask “What is a median?”

To get started with data journalism break it into parts

Acquisition

Where does a tonne of data live?

Generally this data hasn’t been packaged up.

e.g. Ministry of Health’s Covid-19 data

Acquisition exercises

• Scrape data from MoH

  • Summarise
  • Plot something

• Twitter API

  • Choose a person

  • Grab their tweets

  • Look for a phrase/word

  • Count it’s frequency

  • Choose a person or list

  • Grab their tweets

  • Do a Sentiment analysis

Workbench Step Groupings

• Clean
• Analyse
• Visualise

Also

• Email alerts
• Notes

Other important New Zealand data sources

• StatsNZ
• NZTA
• Ministry of Transport
• Police
• MBIE

Exercise

• Pick one of these other sources of data
• Try and export it
• Load it into Workbench
• Tidy it up and ship it over to datawrapper