470: quantum of sollazzo

#470: quantum of sollazzo – 31 May 2022

The data newsletter by @puntofisso.

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. The newsletter 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.

Last week I spoke (virtually) at the Data Journalism UK 2022 conference, sharing a panel with some truly excellent folks (including a former Quantum of Sollazzo's Six Questions interviewee!). But what caught my attention is the chart below by John Burn-Murdoch. You can compare what the House of Commons has done here in Parli-n-grams.

Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Alice Corona, creator of data-driven narratives.

'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

Six questions to...

Alice Corona

Alice is a creator of data-based narratives and designer of data trainings.

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

Because I freelance, it means my daily data work varies a lot.
Sometimes I work with clients with a strong data department; they bring their own data and need help with the communication and visualization.
Other times I get to work with good communicators, like journalists. Then I am usually asked to support in things like data collection strategies, structuring and cleaning spreadsheets, or creating visualizations.
I also collaborate with local activists to free up data, particularly on housing rights in Venice (Italy), and design public activities, games and “data walks” to share that data with the community.

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

My first data investigation, at Uni 10 years ago. It was a group work about surveillance tech funded by the EU and the public money flowing to privacy-invasive projects. I had to learn scraping, Xpath queries, and Gephi - thanks to the talented data journalist Adriana Homolova who was in my group.
At that time, learning these things made me feel like I was conjuring up awesome magic I didn’t think I could be capable of. This feeling got less common with age and experience, but whenever it happens again, my mind goes back to that project when I felt it first.

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

Oh, there are so many, it is hard to pick one! From a storytelling point of view, I love Bussed Out by the Guardian. I feel it is a perfect mix of data, engaging writing, photos and videos all intertwined together magnificently. 
In terms of tools, I am in awe with Elvis Defence tenders exposed, which helps journalists navigate the complex world of public procurement data to find juicy stories. 
And I really wish I had done some more data physicalization projects, like the works by Matteo Moretti, Domestic Data Streamers and Jose Duarte.

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

… oh, how much cleaning will it need?

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

Embrace ambiguity, embrace fuzzy categories: not everything needs to be simplified, perfectly coded and standardized!

Data is or data are...

I say “data is” out of habit. In writing, though, I try to correct myself: data is indeed plural, not only in terms of grammar.

Topical

We Asked 2,000 Americans About Their Biggest Concern

The accuracy of the assessment behind those concerns is not great, though.

More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine

A grim analysis of the data about shooting in the US by the Washington Post. "The median age of school shooters is 16."

Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard

"African-Americans are more likely to own cryptocurrencies", a fact I didn't expect to see so starkly in this Graphic Detail issue by the Economist. The causes of this are disconcerting, but not unexpected.
(via Soph Warnes' Fair Warning)

Cloudy climate… with a chance of meatballs

Germany is a notoriously meat-eating country, but even there some reduction has been seen – not fast enough, suggests this chart by Datawrapper.

Why Forgiving Student Loan Debt Is So Complicated

Rachel Dottle and colleagues take a look at the challenges in both going big and going small with debt reduction, one of the Biden administration's policies.

Tools & Tutorials

What, exactly, is a “community level”?

The Washington Post's "How to read this chart" newsletter offers a critique of how COVID transmission maps published by the CDC have been at conveying their intended meaning.

Get started making sounds

In case you need to, here "you’ll learn how to use a synth’s controls to design your own sounds." It's pretty and interactive.

How random forests really work

A tutorial based on the popular "Titanic competition" on Kaggle.

Data thinking

Open All of the Satellite Imagery Archives

"A moral and economic argument for ushering in the global monitoring revolution that the world urgently needs"

Don’t just run your data team like a product team, run it like a company that needs to scale

"I keep coming back to this issue of scale. Data teams are always under-resourced, but simultaneously can be seen by those who hold the purse strings as an already expensive investment."
Sounds familiar, huh?

What Is Active Metadata, and Why Does It Matter?

"Think of active metadata as a viral story. It shows up everywhere you already live in what seems like seconds. It’s immediately cross-checked against and combined with other information, bringing together a network of related context into a larger trend or story. And it sparks conversations, making everyone more knowledgable and informed in the end."
I had never heard of the concept of active metadata, and Prukalpa Sankar (another Six Questions graduate) makes her usual great job of explaining it clearly.

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Reproductive rights and ... ??

"With the recent Supreme Court leak concerning Roe v Wade, I thought it might be a good time to explore how a respect for reproductive rights correlates with other health care indicators. This visualization is the result."
This is an Observable notebook. I can't give enough praise to Observable for how they're revolutionising the sharing of data analysis work in ways that is both open source, fully replicable, and visually appealing.

The Australian election map has been lying to you

Readers of this newsletter will recognise in this article the ever-important topic of moving from geographically accurate maps to charts that convey the fact that constituencies in first-past-the-post systems are usually based on equal-population constituencies.

Pandemic leaves more than a million dead in US and many questions

Some nice black and white charts in this USA Today article.