Simon Rogers
Simon Rogers
The weight of words (and data)
This is the introduction I wrote to a new book from the excellent data team at Paris Match, published in French. Check out the project here. What’s in a word? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The fortunes of a political campaign can turn with a single word. The right ones can propel a … Continue reading
Want to build a VR network chart? Here’s a way to do it without coding
Making a virtual reality visual is traditionally a tricky thing, as we found out in building one around Brexit. It requires coding and developers and there are many rules about avoiding making people feel physically sick. That’s a barrier to use. But recently, a new platform has made it a lot easier to visualise data … 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
Visual journalism gallery: images from the world’s best newsrooms and designers
Journalism hasn’t been ‘just’ words for some time — and there’s a phrase for one strand: ‘Visual Journalism’. I’ve written one of the pieces in a new book from Gestalten which provides a detailed (and beautiful) look at the field, combining images and text. But the real stars are the visuals. Here’s a selection. Visual Journalism on Amazon
A new machine learning app for reporting on hate in America
Hate crimes in America have historically been difficult to track since there is very little official data collected. What data does exist is incomplete and not very useful for reporters keen to learn more. This led ProPublica — with the support of the Google News Lab — to form Documenting Hate earlier this year, acollaborative reporting project that aims to create a national … Continue reading
Data needs empathy to make it real
The latest in our series of data visualisation projects sees Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer apply their unique take on life to Google data. The pair together make up Datasketch.es. Shirley is based in San Francisco, Nadieh in Amsterdam, and the two regularly produce complementary work that tells beautiful stories. This month, in the latest … Continue reading
Open data is a right
It’s not that long ago that open data was set to change the world. Governments across the globe opened their vast vaults of data. By mid-2010, it looked like the river of data was unstoppable. First the US launch of data.gov, then data.gov.uk — and then a “tsunami” of open data around the globe, from Bahrain … Continue reading
Gallery: visualising technology and our changing world
Last year the first three of four infographics books for children that I have worked on were published. Now you can get the fourth. Technology is designed by the brilliant Studio Muti and the images above are a selection of some of the spreads. You can get the book on Amazon right now.
Documenting Hate: gathering data where there is none
Data journalism has to do one important thing to prove its worth: it has to matter. And providing data where there is none is a key part of that role. This is where Documenting Hate comes in. The project, which includes a number of different news organisations and journalists, is designed to change that by collecting, … Continue reading
US election 2016: How to download county-level results data
If open data means anything, it applies to elections. But yet here we are, a week after the results, and open data around the results is hard to find. It matters because having that data allows us to understand the results better, and what they say about America today. It also means that the data can … Continue reading
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