Simon Rogers

It’s hard enough to leave The Guardian without your friends doing stuff like this for you. This is the handiwork of the rather lovely Guardian graphics team – especially Paul Scruton, Mark McCormick and Christine Oliver.

After nearly 15 inspiring years at the Guardian, I will be leaving at the end of May to join the Twitter media team in San Francisco as its first Data Editor. A lot has changed since 1998 when I joined as editor of NewsUnlimited, the then-titled GuardianUnlimited’s news section.The front page of the site looked like this: … Continue reading »

First published on the Guardian Datablog How often does a map change the world? In 1854, one produced by Doctor John Snow, altered it forever. In the world of the 1850s, cholera was believed to be spread by miasma in the air, germs were not yet understood and the sudden and serious outbreak of cholera … Continue reading »

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 »

Just seen the proofs for Facts are Sacred, out in April – these are some of Kari Pedersen’s amazing designs

I’ve been building up a collection of border files for us to use in Google Fusion table maps – and these are the key ones. You can download these as KML files or as CSVs. Or merge them with your data. If you have a shp file you what to convert to Google Fusion tables … Continue reading »

The workshop below was written by Kathryn Hurley at Google and is a brilliant guide to how to get started with Fusion tables.  Fusion Tables is a modern data management web application making it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables online. Follow the steps below to upload your own data … Continue reading »

I have been teaching basic data journalism for a while now – and these links are so useful I keep them with me every time. I will add and update these in the future too Free and simple viz tools Datawrapper: http://datawrapper.de/ CartoDB: good alternative to Fusion Tables Google charts via spreadsheets Mapping: Google Fusion … Continue reading »

First published on Guardian Data Before a dataset results in a data journalism story, there’s a whole process of sifting and finessing and generally sorting the data out. The split is roughly 70% tidying up the data, 30% doing the fun stuff of visualising and presenting it. So, how do we get through that 70%? … Continue reading »

This is a chord… this is another… this is a third. NOW FORM A BAND So went the first issue of British punk fanzine Sideburns in 1977 in the “first and last part in a series”. It might be 35 years old, but this will do nicely as a theory of data journalism in 2012. … Continue reading »

Data is everywhere: from governments publishing billions of bytes of the stuff, to visual artists creating new concepts of the world through to companies building businesses on the back of it. And everyone wants to be a data journalist too – the barriers for entry have never been lower as free tools change the rules … Continue reading »