Tag Archives: public data

OUseful: New public data Q&A site launches

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Open University lecturer, self-proclaimed mashup artist and all-round bright spark Tony Hirst blogs about a new Q&A site designed to help people with open data questions.

GetTheData.org is in “startup/bootstrapping” phase at the moment but already has a fair bit of information up.

The idea behind the site is to field questions and answers relating to the practicalities of working with public open data: from discovering data sets, to combining data from different sources in appropriate ways, getting data into formats you can happily work with, or that will play nicely with visualisation or analysis tools you already have, and so on.

Full post on OUseful.info at this link.

h/t: Online Journalism Blog

‘If you could see my desk, you’d weep’: Santa Fe reporter trawls data for wealth story

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Here’s a great example of the value in data for journalists.

The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism ran a feature on Corey Pein, a journalist for Santa Fe Reporter, who spent two weeks working through raw data to compile a list of the wealthiest residents on his patch.

His resources included property records, nonprofit tax returns, donor lists, private aircraft registrations and court records.

If you could see my desk, you’d weep over the messes of paper I create for those feature-length stories.

His final story won him first place in the AltWeekly Awards for Innovation/Format Buster.

The publisher has used public database site, Socrata, to create five searchable online databases from the information Pein’s work uncovered.