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JournoCon 2018: A Recap of our first data-driven conference

by Kira Schacht 0 Comments
JournoCon 2018: A Recap of our first data-driven conference

On March 24th, we hosted the JournoCon 2018. A data journalism bootcamp-slash-conference for students, freelance journalists and anyone wanting to learn more about the field. To those who were there: Thank you for making it an amazing day! To those who weren’t: Here’s a recap.

For beginners, it’s not always easy to get into data-driven work. You need skills you usually don’t learn in journalism schools, and in many newsrooms, there’s no infrastructure in place for journalists to augment their skills and connect with designers and developers. Still, what most journalists, in our experience, have, is motivation. What they generally do not have are

Scraping for everyone

by Elena Erdmann 1 Comment
Scraping for everyone

by Sophie Rotgeri, Moritz Zajonz and Elena Erdmann

One of the most important skills for data journalists is scraping. It allows us to download any data that is openly available online as part of a website, even when it’s not supposed to be downloaded: may it be information about the members of parliament or – as in our christmas-themed example – a list of christmas markets in Germany.

There are some tools that don’t require any programming and which are sufficient for many standard scraping tasks. However, programmed scrapers can be fitted precisely to the task at hand. Therefore, some more complicated scraping might require programming.

Extracting geodata from OpenStreetMap with Osmfilter

by Journocode 2 Comments
Extracting geodata from OpenStreetMap with Osmfilter

A guest post by Hans Hack

When working on map related projects, I often need specific geographical data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) from a certain area. For a recent project of mine, I needed all the roads in Germany in a useful format so I can work with them in a GIS program. So how do I do I get the data to work with? With a useful little program called Osmfilter.

From the data to the story: A typical ddj workflow in R

by Marie-Louise Timcke 2 Comments
From the data to the story: A typical ddj workflow in R

R is getting more and more popular among Data Journalists worldwide, as Timo Grossenbacher from SRF Data pointed out recently in a talk at useR!2017 conference in Brussels. Working as a data trainee at Berliner Morgenpost’s Interactive Team, I can confirm that R indeed played an important role in many of our lately published projects, for example when we identified the strongholds of german parties. While we also use the software for more complex statistics from time to time, something that R helps us with on a near-daily basis is the act of cleaning, joining and superficially analyzing data. Sometimes it’s just to briefly check if there is a story hiding in the data. But sometimes, the steps you will learn in this tutorial are just the first part of a bigger, deeper data analysis.

JavaScript: Interactive Leaflet.js map with search bar

by Marie-Louise Timcke 3 Comments
JavaScript: Interactive Leaflet.js map with search bar

In our previous posts about Leaflet.js, we coded an interactive marker map and learned how to update our data with a google spreadsheet. In this short tutorial, we will show you how to make your map searchable so users can find a specific marker.

We’ll use the code of the already finished map that’s hosted on our GitHub page so we don’t have to start at the very beginning again. Simply download the directory to your computer and open it in your text editor. If you’ve never created an interactive map with Leaflet.js before, please have a look at the two tutorials mentioned above before proceeding with this one.

JavaScript: Loop through a Google Spreadsheet

by Marie-Louise Timcke 2 Comments
JavaScript: Loop through a Google Spreadsheet

In our post Coding marker maps with Leaflet.js we filled a map visualization with information given directly in the code, but we also learned how to loop through data in a JSON file to create markers and pop-ups. This time, we will loop through an public Google Spreadsheet. We will do this with the same example map as in the previous post. But this little trick will not only help you with building marker maps but can come in handy for any JavaScript application you need to automate the handling of your data.

So let’s start right away with setting up a data table with Google Spreadsheets.

How to encrypt your emails with PGP keys

by Moritz Zajonz 1 Comment
How to encrypt your emails with PGP keys

Important: This encryption tutorial is aimed at Linux-users. However, if you are using a Windows or macOS machine, the process is very similar. If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact us.

Secure online conversation is not a simple thing. There are various possibilities, depending on your needs. For journalists this might be protecting their sources. Offering a way for people to stay anonymous when they contact you might go a long way towards cultivating sources . We will guide you through the process with this tutorial, so, if you want to know how to send and receive emails securely, continue reading.

JavaScript: Coding marker maps with Leaflet.js

by Marie-Louise Timcke 4 Comments
JavaScript: Coding marker maps with Leaflet.js

Showing locations on a map can be pretty cool to provide some context for your story or to give your reader an overview of where the story takes place. A good way to build a simple, yet responsive and professional looking map is to use the JavaScript library Leaflet.

In an earlier post, “Your first choropleth map“, we used Leaflet as well, but coded the map using the Leaflet R package, which works like a wrapper to translate the more common Leaflet functions into R syntax. It’s very useful if you’re more used to R syntax and don’t want to learn JavaScript anytime soon. But using the original JS library and coding the map with JavaScript will give us way more freedom when customizing the map, which is why we’ll try it that way today.

As an example, let’s start with a map of the locations of some data journalism newsrooms in the German speaking area. As always you can find all the code of this tutorial on our GitHub page.

This is what the finished map will look like:

HTML, CSS & a little JavaScript: The Basics (Part II)

by Kira Schacht 3 Comments
HTML, CSS & a little JavaScript: The Basics (Part II)

Part I

This is part two of our tutorial on HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. In the last part, we learned about the basic functions of those three languages and have gotten to know a few useful HTML commands. If you’ve already read part one or you know all of that stuff anyway, this is the perfect spot for you to continue – by learning about CSS and how to implement JavaScript libraries into your webpage. Let’s get right to it!

CSS