#415: quantum of sollazzo
#415: quantum of sollazzo – 30 March 2021
The data newsletter by @puntofisso.
Good morning, folks, especially to the hundreds of new readers who subscribed over the past couple of weeks.
There’s over 2,000 of you now, all organically grown since I started sending a handful of geeky links to a bunch of friends in 2012.
“Quantum of sollazzo” is a user friendly newsletter, so please send feedback, ideas, and links that you would like to see featured.
It is a free newsletter that I do mostly for pleasure and my own link archiving obsession, but if you’re a fan you’re welcome to support me via GitHub or Buy Me A Coffee. If you want to buy advertising space, please get in touch and I’ll send you an up to date sponsor kit.
The latest issue of the Economist’s Off the charts newsletter was an absolute corker. The lead piece, written by Marie Segger, was the story of how the team decided to map Cambodia to show the correlation between soil fertility and the bombs dropped 40 years earlier.
It is a really thoughtful insight into the choices that go into making a map that tells a catchy story through complex data, making that data easy to immediately grasp. These were my three key takeaways:
- don’t be afraid of extra dimensions
- think outside of the box
- combine different chart types into one.
None of this is easy to do in a balanced way, of course, and that’s why they are The Economist’s data team :) But it’s truly inspiring that they’re so open about how they conduct their work.
Speaking of The Economist, this map has been circulating, showing the massive outlier that was the COVID rate in the city of Bolzano, one of my favourite areas of Italy.
Except… there was no outlier. The data was, in some way, incorrect: there were old cases that had not been added to the counts and the public administration decided to add them all together to the new version of the dataset. I say “in some way” incorrect because for the use that the public administration had in mind, the final tally was all that mattered. But this is not how many other users of that same data processed it.
As my friends at Dataninja say in their latest newsletter, data are not the best source of information if there is no understanding of how they are created and why.
And so I find myself in two camps: as a data user, I must feel the responsibility to always challenge what the data seems to be telling me; but as a data producer (with my public servant hat) I also feel a massive responsibility to make sure that the data creation process is clear and well documented.
The new release of the Data Journalism Handbook, edited by Liliana Bounegru and Jonathan Gray, has been published.
I turned 39 on the 29th, but let’s not say it too loudly (I only celebrate on powers of 2 anyway, so my next birthday is some years away).
And after all this blabber, you can now enjoy your links below.
‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
Politics
[£] Revealed: the truth about the peers who are born to rule
Excellent data collection and interactive visualization by Tom Calver on The Times for this very critical article on the 85 hereditary peers who are members of the House of Lords.
Navigate through the political regimes in the world
This is a Tableau dashboard to explore the different forms of political regimes.
Equality & Diversity
This Is Where Hate Crimes Don’t Get Reported
According to ProPublica, not all US jurisdictions comply with the legal requirement to report hate crimes. Harris County, with a population of over 1.8 million, reported 0 in the year 2016.
A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters
Racial segregation is notoriously visible in US Census data. This article uses the same techniques to look at what it calls “partisan segregation”, i.e. the geographic concentration of people by party political allegiance.
“But keep zooming in — say, to the level of individual addresses for 180 million registered voters — and this pattern keeps repeating itself: within metro areas, within counties and cities, even within parts of the same city.”
P.S. I’m not entirely convinced by the use of the word “segregation” here, with the baggage it carries.
An analysis of 27,000 Instagram images show that fashion’s BLM reckoning was mostly bluster
This is a quirky and interesting article by Quartz. It looks at the average skin tone of the people portrayed in a number of Instagram accounts belonging to fashion firms. Interestingly, Instagram is the avenue that many of these firms chose to voice their support for the BLM movement.
Food apartheid in Washington DC
“A look at the food system of income, race, and geography.”
COVID
Revealed: the data that shows how Covid bounced back after UK’s lockdowns
“As we exit a third national lockdown, analysis shows how infections surged again after the first two”. Excellent dataviz work (the bounce effect to show a bounce in figures is a touch of geeky genius) by one of my favourite dataviz teams led by Ashley Kirk at The Guardian.
Getting rid of cash payments: who benefits?
“Paying by card rather than cash is not an insignificant gesture. It has political, economic and social implications. “
Not all positives, according to this article by Laurence D’Hondt and reported by the European Data Journalism Network. Also note the variance in cash use in different EU countries.
How Tos
Clara Guibourg: COVID-19 death toll in European regions
In this video for OBC Transeuropa, Clara Guibourg, “data journalist at Journalism++/Newsworthy, […] presents how she approached the subject [of investigating excess deaths] starting from summer 2020, including the type and limits of the various sources.”
Interestingly, it shows how to generate articles automatically by applying a template to changing data.
Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery
This is a tad on the hardcore side even for this newsletter’s readers, but it might be useful.
“One thing that I found remarkable was the self-similarity of the martian terrain. As the lander descends towards the ground it is hard to get a sense of scale, since there is no familiar frame of reference to tell us how far away the ground is. This led me to embark on a project in which I reproject the footage onto a satellite image obtained from the Mars Express Orbiter, along with a scale to tell us how large features on the ground actually are.”
This is DUG, an organizational guide to data journalism for small-to-medium and non-profit newsrooms
“Does your newsroom want to stand up a data team?” A step-by-step guide by Caldern LLC and the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.
“The Data Unit Guide seeks to offer start-up resources for small-to-medium and non-profit newsrooms interested in building out their data journalism capacity. Its ideal reader is, well, someone at one of those organizations tasked with doing exactly that. The guide is free to use, and we’ve sought to integrate as many free and open-source tools as possible throughout.”
Which color scale to use when visualizing data
Part 1 of a 4-strong series by Lisa Charlotte Rost at Datawrapper.
Everything else
What Data can’t do
“When it comes to people—and policy—numbers are both powerful and perilous.”
Brilliant article by Hannah Fry for The New Yorker.
Two papers
“Two papers on the future city: The Socially Distanced City, then The Morphology of a Post-Pandemic City. Hypothetical speculations then ported to simulating future London.”
Two working papers by UCL CASA, WP 225 and WP 226, both by Prof Michael Batty.
(via Massimo Conte)
Perfect shots forever: 40 years of men’s NCAA tournament buzzer-beaters
“The graphic below shows the 37 game-winning buzzer-beaters — shots that landed with no time left on the clock — in the past 40 years of the NCAA men’s tournament.”
I mean, I know almost nothing about basketball, except it’s been one of the most data-driven sports from an early time.
Become a GitHub Sponsor. It costs about the price of a coffee per month, and you’ll get an Open Data Rottweiler sticker (and other stuff).
If you’re a supporter of this newsletter, thanks a lot for your support. Share this e-mail with a friend, or via social media.
quantum of sollazzo is supported by my GitHub Sponsors and Buy Me A Coffee supporters, and by ProofRed, who offer an excellent proofreading service. If you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, head to http://proofred.co.uk. Oh, they also make really good explainer videos.
