Telling good data-driven stories
| Class 2 | Jan. 25, 2017 |
What goes into good storytelling, data or otherwise. Digging into data
Story
Readings from homework
- The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever
- The Problem We All Live With
- A senior year mostly lost for a Normandy honor student
- What is Data Journalism?
Discussion points
- Describe the structure
- List all the sources that went into telling the story
- Reverse engineer the questions or pitch that the reporter presented to his or her boss assuming they had done no reporting yet
- What did you find most compelling about the story?
- What’s the most complicated idea you took from the story?
Presentations
Lab
Walkthroughs
Data for lab
Homework
Read (before Feb. 1)
| Type | Where | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Reading | Data Journalism Handbook | Using Data Visualization to Find Insights in Data |
| Reading | Data Journalism Handbook | Using visualizations to tell stories |
| Reading | Polygraph | An interactive visualization of every line in Hamilton |
| Reading | FiveThirtyEight | Hamilton is the very model of a modern fast-paced musical |
| Reading | WSJ | How does ‘Hamilton’ the non stop, hip-hop Broadway sensation tap rap’s master rhymes to blur musical lines? |
| Reading | Producers Perspective | 50 years of Broadway musical source material |
| Reading | WSJ | The Business of Broadway |
Lab (due Feb. 1)
Three parts to this homework
Using this data, figure out the five school districts in Connecticut with (you’ll need to make a copy to your drive like last time)
- the smallest gaps in standardized test scores between Black students and White students
- You’ll probably need to refer to this codebook to make sure you’re choosing the right column to sort. (Hint, it’s not any of them with “se” in the name since that stands for standard error and make sure you’re looking at the GapC sheet at the bottom)
Using this data, figure out the five school districts in Connecticut with
- the smallest index value for segregation (zero means no segregation, so the school districts closest to zero)
- Hint the column you want to sort is dozens of columns to the right called hswhtblk
Using the methods we used to determine the gap in percent of shootings between Hispanics and Whites in the lab:
Figure out the average gap by state between Black and White students using the first data set in this lab homework.
Where does Connecticut rank?
Save the spreadsheets of the results in your folder and send me a note with the answer when you’ve completed it.