What did I try to do?
I chose the two news stories that I would have been covering these last two weeks if I had been in Madrid and I though of how to communicate them with data visualization. The two stories were:
– WHO’s report about deaths atributed to air pollution.
– UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) latest report warming that climate change will be an important threat to security, food and humankind.
My (many) DIFFICULTIES
My first difficulty was acces to data. I got a press release and a longer written report from WHO about its latest findings about air pollution consequences for health, but I didn’t have the data and I couldn’t find it online. I asked for it and they sent me data from 2004!
I tried to find air pollution and deaths information for Europe and for Spain, and… it was not possible to find anything suitable to put into a spreadsheet.
After having not success on the air pollution I jumped into the climate change story. On a week where there are tons of literature in western media about the natural disasters that are yet to come because of global warming, I wanted to develop a data visualization story showing that we are already suffering an increase of extreme weather events that seems to have something to do with climate change.
Again, I couldn’t find the data for Europe or Spain, though this time I was lucky with the US.
NOAA has a compilation of the largest climate disasters occurred in the US since 1980. Data was on PDF format and although I tried different programs, I couldn’t converted it into an excel spreadsheet… So, I did a spreadsheet by myself with the data from the last 3 years, which took me about 4 hours.
Next step was mapping the data. I tried ArcGIS Online, Google Fusion Tables and Tilemill and I didn’t success with any of them because after many hours I got to the conclusion that the data collected didn’t really match with the idea of visualizacion that I had. I learned that I should have collected and organized the data in a different way to get the result I wanted; and that I should have asked for help to somebody who knows how to code, but when I figured this out it was too late.
Since I wanted to show something for the class tomorrow, I decided to use some of my data with a tool I wanted to learn about: Timeline.
The result
So, here are the main climate disasters occurred in the US in 2013, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center
Thanks for your earnest report on the difficulties you faced. I think that’s an important contribution to any discussion of data journalism: how hard it can be just to get the data you want, AND THEN you have to analyze it and visualize it in a compelling way. You can imagine there being a need for data preparation specialists in the newsroom: staff whose job it is to hunt down and get data in a usable format on behalf on journalists working on the end story and context. Data journalism is ideally a team sport.