Best tutorials for data journalists

I compiled a round-up of video tutorials and webinars which I found most useful during the last couple of months of my training to become a data journalist.

Data scraping

A series of webinars by Alex Gimson from import.io on:

1. Auto table extraction
2. Building a data crawler
3. Getting data behind passwords
4. Datasets

And good news – there will be more! Watch this space: http://blog.import.io/

Data visualisation

A series of webinars by Jewel Loree from Tableau on:

1. Basic Tableau Proficiency 
2. Actions, Filters and Parameters in Tableau Public
3. Data Formatting, joins, blends, and table calculations

Two more to come, stay tuned on Tableau Software YouTube channel.

Mapping

A tutotial by Andrew Hill on using CartoDB for mapping:

Online mapping for beginners

Two Google Fusion Tables tutorials which will teach you how to make:

1. a point map
2. a polygon map

and here come two webinars you can still take part in:

• Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools – run by the European Journalism Centre
• Making Sense of Data – by Google

Obviously, the list is not exhaustive and you would need to do some more reading around the content of the tutorials. Blogs run by the people behind the software should be very helpful in getting more insight into the particular problems you might encounter on the way.

Advertisement

Prisoners of conscience in the world – mapped with Google Fusion Tables

Prisoners of conscience behind the bars

With the release of Russia’s most prominent political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the amnesty bill that will set free feminist punk group Pussy Riot and 30 Greenpeace activists seized in September, Russia shows its willingness to compromise in order to improve its tarnished image abroad.

Whether it is a mere public relations exercise ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi or not, the amnesty is an elegant argument in Vladimir Putin’s hand against any diplomatic boycotts that might resurface on this occasion.

Mr Putin is not the first one to show his grace this year. In an effort to improve Iran’s relationship with the West, Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s moderate president, freed 11 political prisoners on the eve of his visit to the United States in September.

Myanmar also fulfilled its pledge to grant amnesty to all prisoners of conscience by the end of the year. President Thein Sein released 41 political detainees at the beginning of December.

All three countries regularly come under sharp criticism for their human rights record.

These two interactive maps allow you to explore where in the world prisoners of conscience as recognised by Amnesty International were still imprisoned at the end of 2012, and which countries set some of them free.

Prisoners of conscience released in 2012