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2019-03-04 | J++ Nyhetsbrev #70

At JournalismCourses.org, the Knight Center for Journalism provides free or low-cost MOOC:s that are open for anyone to participate in. Right now they are running a course on The Impact of AI in the Newsroom. If you want to learn how to apply machine learning techniques, this is not the course for you, but if you are interested in getting a crash course in how newsrooms around the world are automating journalism - we recommend that you check it out.

(If you don't care, at least look at this introduction video because <humble_brag> our service Newsworthy is mentioned as an example alongside projects by Duke University and Reuters </humble_brag>.)

Inspiration

The Gyllenhaal experiment
The Pudding is nothing short of great. In a recent article they explore the difficulties of spelling celebrities' names. As always with stories from The Pudding, the result is interactive so check it out!

The Pudding story was inspired by Colin Morris who analysed Reddit for commonly misspelled words. You can find Colin's code at Github: https://github.com/colinmorris/reddit-dubious-spelling.

Maybe you can find out which politicians most often get their names misspelled?

The cost of upgrading to a bigger apartment
Housing prices definitely falls into the category of commonly used data. By asking how much an extra bedroom would cost if you lived in the US, this blog post from Priceonomics shows us that there are still interesting angles to approach.

Analysing sport upsets
Last week, 19 yo Frida Karlsson won a surprise silver in the 10k race at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Seefeld. Jens Finnäs gathered some historical data and analysed the ages of every championship medalist since 1924 to figure out just how rare an achievement that was.

Available in swedish: https://twitter.com/jensfinnas/status/1100514211342503938

Tools

Help ICIJ test Datashare
Datashare is an open-source platform that allows you to search and organise documents locally. It was used by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists when they worked on the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. Datashare is now open for beta testing so quickly download the app here and give it a go!

(Interestingly, Datashare was built with support from Postkodlotteriet.)

LibreOffice introduces regex
The latest LibreOffice release, version 6.2, finally supports regular expressions in formulas. This has been available in Google Sheets for some time, but is still not supported in Excel. You will now be able to do things like:

=REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\w+ municipality") (get every sequence of letters followed by a space and the word ”municipality”), and
=REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}") (get everything that looks like a YYYY-MM-DD date).

The time to upgrade your QGIS is here
QGIS, the open source “Excel for geodata”, just released another update worth mentioning. Version 3.6 irons out quite a few quirks, especially around the vertex tool UX. With this latest update, there are few reasons left not to update to the 3.x series

Deadlines

You have three more days to submit your work to this year's round of the Data Journalism Awards. What are you waiting for? As always with the DJA, you can see submitted projects in real time.

J++ Stockholm | http://jplusplus.org/

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