Data Journalism - A Quick & Practical Guide

Rob Wells, Ph.D.   
Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Strategic Media   
rswells@uark.edu  | 479.575.6305

Section 1: Introduction to data analysis

–Introduction to data analysis, including math for journalists

   Basics of Data Analysis
   Numbers in the Newsroom
   Excel Exercise: Transit Data and Calculating a Rate
   Review: Mac OSX Basics

–Organizing your data

   Best practices in data management
   Organizational tips for files
   Data documentation skills

–Data cleaning

   Filtering
   Reading Data Dictionaries
   Data Cleaning Exercises

–Data Visualization

   Principles of Data Visualization
   Cleveland McGill Scale
   Important Resources for Surveying the Data Visualization Options
   Color Choices
   Build a Cover Image Using Canva or InDesign or Powerpoint
   Higher Resolution Graphics in Tableau

–Writing About Data

   Writing Style Notes
   Common Errors – Math
   AP Style with Numbers

–Excel Bootcamp

   Review four corners
   How to Filter in Excel
   Basics and Sorting in Excel
   Practice Rates and Ratios
   Excel formulas
   Pivot Tables
   Countif Function

Section 2: Data Analysis Tools

–Graphic by Jessica Kloss, 2018 Honors thesis

–Basic Tableau

   Downloading instructions for Tableau
   Getting started tutorial with video
   Building a basic COVID data chart with video and transcript
   Using filters and calculations with video and transcript
   Tutorial on Tableau calculations with video
   Proper formatting of a filter bar in Tableau, video
   Links to additional Tableau Tutorials

–Tableau - Maps

   Mapping tutorial & sample dataset
   Build a Map COVID-19 Positivity in Arkansas Counties
   Video
   Dual Mapping - Bubble Maps

–Basic Flourish

   Videos to Get Started
   Beginning Documents
   Flourish Design Tips
   More Resources
   Adam Marton Cheat Sheet
   Flourish newsrooms plan
   Flourish - Stories
   Examples from Fall Class
   Basic Map
   Flourish Links

–Basic Datawrapper

     First Datawrapper Chart
     Tutorials
     Adam Marton Datawrapper Training
     Automatic chart updates
     Maps in Datawrapper

Section 3: R for Data Journalists

–Introduction to R

    Install R and R Studio.
     Basic tutorial on R
     R1_Intro-to-R exercises
     Reading
     Reproducible research Repetitive tasks in modern newsrooms
     Popular R Libraries
     Data Types and R
     Reference: Logical Operators in R
     Packages
     Important Reference Materials
     R and R Studio

–R data visualization

     Basic GGPLOT
     Using color
     Formatting PNG for export
     Scatterplots
     Histograms
     Box plots
     Line graphs
     ggplot cookbook 4-26-20.rmd

–R data cleaning

     Data cleaning exercises using SF police data
     Clean names, Process dates
     top_n: table with just the top five counties’ crime rate
     Grouping by Disposition
     Filters
     A more complex filter
     String manipulation
     Rename specific strings: str_replace_all
     Using a lookup table to replace all the values
     gsub - delete space
     convert all text to lowercase
     Make into html table
     Make bubble chart
     Data cleaning exercises, homeless children in Arkansas

–Cookbook of common tasks

A searchable list of useful command I have compiled.

Section 4: Publishing your work

–WordPress

     Using WordPress
     Access back end
     Embedding interactive data
     Embed Flourish in WordPress
     Embed Tableau in WordPress
     Building the Web Page

–GitHub for beginners

The GitHub concept
Practicing GitHub

Appendix

–Teams and Slack

1 Introduction to Data Analysis