Simon Rogers
dataviz
A decade of working in data journalism: what has changed?
When I decided I wanted to be a journalist, somewhere between the first and second years of primary school, it never occurred to me that would involve data. Now, working with data every day, I realise how lucky I was. It certainly was not the result of carefully-calibrated career plans. I was just in the … Continue reading
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
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
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
Building an Alternative Olympic Medal Table
Since the modern Olympics began nearly 120 years ago, they have been dissected and evaluated through every possible angle. But data journalism is about looking at the world anew through the fresh lens of facts and numbers. With the Games in full swing, all eyes are on the medal table: who’s winning and which countries … Continue reading
How to make a multi-screen interactive
Sometimes you’ll want to join more than one map, chart or other visual together — but if you’re not a developer it can be a little tricky. This is where the iframe scaffolder by Paris-based developer from Journalism++ Pierre Romera comes in. I made this map — used by Mother Jones — using the tool, which made it simple to … Continue reading
A data journalist at Twitter
In 2013, as I was about to start at Twitter, Alex Howard wrote a piece pondering on just what a data journalist would do at a tech company. Now, as I’m about to begin a new adventure, I thought I should collect together a selection of the projects worked on with some amazing developers and others … Continue reading
Twitter Reverb: how we made a new #dataviz tool
Anybody who tells you that working with big data is straightforward is probably lying. Often, what you’re trying to do is to filter it down, make it simpler and easier to deal with. Twitter data is no exception—there are more than 500 million tweets sent every day and if you’re “non-eng” (not an engineer), that is … Continue reading
Gallery: taking #dataviz beyond infinity
If you were in downtown San Francisco recently, you may have seen a blue box in the middle of the street (yes, it was Tardis blue), next to the Embarcadero centre. Inside was a data visualisation conceived and created by Roundhouse in collaboration with Universal Everything. “Data visualisation” is underselling it. I got to work on the data part of … Continue reading
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