465: quantum of sollazzo

#465: quantum of sollazzo – 26 April 2022

The data newsletter by @puntofisso.

Happy 10th birthday, Quantum of Sollazzo!

Hello, regular readers and welcome new ones :) This is Quantum of Sollazzo, the newsletter about all things data. I am Giuseppe Sollazzo, or @puntofisso. I've been sending this newsletter since 2012 to be a summary of all the articles with or about data that captured my attention over the previous week.

This issue falls exactly 10 years after I sent the first one, for about 25 readers. It's grown to 3,000, still a niche but engaging audience, it has changed name and (slightly) scope, been sponsored by companies and supporters, and given me endless opportunities to learn new things about data and engage with data journalism. I hope you're enjoying it. Please tweet me your memories and what you like of this newsletter.

Quantum of Sollazzo is and will always (well, for as long as I can keep going!) be free, but you're welcome to become a friend via the links below.

Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Sandrine Vieira of Montreal-based newspaper Le Devoir.

'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

Six questions to...

Sandrine Vieira

Sandrine is a data journalist at Le Devoir.

What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?

My work consists of finding and telling stories with data. For example, I worked a lot on COVID-19 in the past year. I would look at the cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccination data of Quebec (the province of our newspaper) and other locations to find trends or anomalies. I mostly use Excel to clean and analyze the data and Datawrapper to create charts.

I also work on special data projects with my team, where I’m in charge of collecting the data, doing the research and writing the story. My team helps me with the data analysis and designing the visuals (with D3.js).

Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...

Last year, the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried at the site of a former residential school in British Columbia created a shock wave across Canada. I found an elaborate statistical report about missing children that frequented those residential schools. After lots of time reviewing the numbers, we came up with a visual story about everything that was documented about them. The exercise did not only put the numbers of that discovery into context, but showed how much information is still missing to this day due to lack of documentation at the time.

...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.

I really love the Washington Post’s project « How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions ». The story shows how the Big 4 - Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google - got to dominate the market by acquiring hundreds of companies over decades. For someone who doesn’t know much about tech companies, I was struck to see the magnitude of the transactions made in new sectors over time.

Also, I always love to see stories that require lots of research like this one. The Post team collected the data from multiple reports and studies, which definitely made me want to go dig into reports myself to do something similar !

If I say "dataset", you think of...

Literally anything! I truly believe that data doesn't have to be hidden in big databases that require hours of time to clean and crunch. I think data can take any form : a story could be based on a few numbers in a report or on data that you collect by yourself over time. With a bit of imagination, it can even be words - we made data projects about political promises during election periods and analyzed speeches to dissect words used during debates.

Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.

Take it one day at a time. Data journalism can be very overwhelming at first, considering all the tools, platforms and programming languages there is to explore. After a while, I realized that I simply couldn’t learn it all right off the bat - and that’s OK. Concentrate on getting better with data in general and master the few tools you need to use on a daily basis. The rest will come eventually. Also, never forget that at the end of the day, it’s the story that matters : practicing your journalistic skills is just as important!

Data is or data are...

Even if it’s technically plural in French, « Data is » just sounds better to me!

Topical

In chilly parts of Europe, heatwaves strengthen environmentalism

"Support for green parties rises following unusually warm years". Not sure whether I find this encouraging or depressing.

Visualizing Air Raid Sirens in Ukraine

Leaflet creator Volodymyr Agafonkin, who's Ukrainian, has scraped data from air raid alert websites/apps and visualized it on a global timeline, with source code available.

Is Marcus Rashford working class? The answer depends on your age

"Exclusive New Statesman polling on 25 celebrities reveals younger generations in Britain are more likely to see rich people as upper class, no matter their background."
(via Warning: Graphic Content)

Tools & Tutorials

Elections Guide for Investigative Reporters: Chapter 1 — New Election Digging Tools

Useful series by the GIJN.

Find case law

An excellent data-driven search engine for case law, just launched in Alpha by the UK National Archives and releasing open data. John Sheridan and his team are extraordinary.

Animation. For everyone.

This tool is a part-manual service to create animated GIFs from paper drawings. It's got quite a few styling options.
Please, folks, do something data related with it and send it to me!

Gear Generator

Exactly what it says on the tin: "a tool for creating involute spur gears".
The beauty of it, beyond the fact that it is oddly relaxing, is that you can actually render to CAD files, and potentially 3D-print them.

Housing England

"Choose a local authority, combined authority, or region of England to see how many homes there are, and what percentage of them are vacant by different measures."
(via Chris Weston)

Data thinking

We can NOT convert a phone number into a location. Sorry.

I facepalmed repeatedly while reading this. Users expect magic, and get angry when you can't do magic. Tough.

When Accuracy Isn’t Enough: Visualization and Game Design

"Modeling typically starts with defining a metric to optimize and, often, this definition of “good” leaves something out. Boosting precision can create room for discrimination, optimizing profit may reinforce inequity, and bad behavior can hide behind good performance metrics. Data science offers many tools for optimization but consider defining the problem itself: what makes a solution desirable and what behaviors mean it works as intended? There’s no one answer with lots of work ongoing in this space (including a need to improve diversity in the discipline itself). However, consider two sometimes uncommon tools that might be able to help: information and game design."

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

BirdCast

BirdCast is a long-standing project trying to analyse bird's movement. It offers a dashboard that describes migration forecasts (over the continental US), together with live migration maps.

AI

This bench does not exist

"We forced an AI to look at thousands of photos of memorial benches. Just because. Here are the results."

I brought my childhood imaginary friend back to life using A.I. (#GPT3)...

"...and it was one of the scariest and most transformative experiences of my life."
Interesting Twitter thread and YouTube video (although I'd take some of the claims with a pinch of salt and a look at Poe's Law).