Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Adam Oxford

Adam Oxford is a freelance journalist, media consultant and civic tech enthusiast. He also works closely with startups developing solutions to access to justice problems.

How the far right play Googlewhack games to SEO their propaganda

Ever notice how the far right come up with some really weird terms to describe those they disagree with (ie everyone else)? There is, apparently, method behind their grammatical madness. According to this Wired story, novel phrases like "crisis actor" and "collusion hoax" are carefully seeded int...

a year ago

Visualising the great age of sail

European explorers of the 18th Century have a lot left to answer for, but tracing their journeys sure is purdy. This collection of visualisations (including an animated video) plots the routes of 300 000 voyages around the world over 100 years. The visualisations aren't just about global trade ro...

a year ago

Umbilical Ruminations

The UN says: Welcome to the “digital welfare dystopia”

Ah, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, what does that old fraud really know? Turns out, he's pretty clued up on the implications of Big Tech, cavalier attitudes to data privacy and its affect on the poor in the Global South. He's not one to mince his langua...

a year ago

Riffing on the riffle

The visualisations have a bit of the Windows Solitaire victory screen about them, nevertheless, this look at what happens when you shuffle a deck of cards using different techniques is awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFF_ZUBZzHY

a year ago

A visual hint for anti-vaxxers

If anti-vaxxers were a threat only to themselves we could sit back and let Darwin do his work. Sadly, not only do they put their children at risk of serious disease, they undermine the principle of herd immunity which helps keep us all safe from preventable disease. Here's the visualisation of ju...

a year ago

They knew. They always knew

The Guardian has been leading this week with a series of number crunching stories around carbon emissions, which it uses to show that just 20 firms have been responsible for 35% of greenhouse gas equivalents since 1965. What makes these businesses particularly culpable - moreso than the people wh...

a year ago

ISS drills into SA crime data like SAPS should

When I grow up I want to work for the Institute of Security Studies... This extremely in depth report on crime in Cape Town township Khayelitsha looks at how SAPS could be using data (but aren't) to identify crime hotspots and allocate resources in such a way that would drastically reduce rates. ...

a year ago

Prehistoric uber-crocs bestrode SA

Zimbabwe's current president is famously nicknamed for a toothy amphibian because of his political agility and cunning, but South Africa used to be ruled by literal crocodiles which stood on two feet and fought dinosaurs. Roar! According to a study published by a Wits team: ‘Rauisuchians’ are non...

a year ago

Now SA can censor the internet (let’s see it try)

The main redeeming feature of South African legislators is that even though they sometimes come up with really bad ideas, very few laws actually ever hit the statute books simply because parliamentary process takes so long the crushing ennui ladens down the President's pen when it comes to signin...

a year ago

CfA looking for a “bullshit detector”

Wanna join the ever expanding Code for Africa and help to seek out and destroy government propaganda wherever it hides? Good news, a position for a digital sleuth doing just that has opened up. CfA calls it a Research Assistant, who will work alongside the famous bot hunters of the Digital Forens...

a year ago

Moaning about moaners

It's good to know that there's one thing people still trust less than the news: each other. According to the editor of the Barnsley Chronicle, reader comments now garner more complaints on his site than actual articles do. Andrew Harrod, who edits the Barnsley Chronicle, says the highest percenta...

a year ago

Atlas shrugged, fell to his knees, front flipped, back flipped and did a handstand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E If you've not seen the video of Boston Dynamic's humanoid Atlas robot doing a passable impression of Jackie Chan acrobatics (Police Story Jackie Chan, not Kung Fu Yoga Jackie Chan, obvs), then you owe it to yourself to watch it now. In other news, the f...

a year ago

NYT bags visual investigation award

The New York Times and Bellingcat just landed themselves an Emmy for their epic OSINT investigation into the murder of Syrian civillians. Disturbing to watch, but a worthy winner. https://twitter.com/malachybrowne/status/1176754823422709761

a year ago

#AmINext is not forgotten

There are so many things I really like about News 24's #AmINext microsite, which tells the story of Uyinene Mrwetyana, the young woman whose death sparked protests against gender-based violence around the country. Nene's background and the story of her murder are told with sensitivity and power, ...

a year ago

CfA scoops WAN-IFRA prize

Congratulations to Code for Africa, which has been awarded a gong by WAN-IFRA at the African Digital Media Awards for its work on land ownership across the continent. Land reform is a hugely important topic, but the lack of actual data about land ownership is often missed in the debates on the su...

a year ago

Mapping justice

One in five South Africans who try to resolve a legal problem give up in the end, and 54% of those who try experience some sort of hardship as a result of trying to get their needs met -- including stress, relationship breakdown or loss of employment. Kenya is very similar, while in the UK it tak...

a year ago

Digging deeper into crime stats

Well blow me down. Not a week ago I was raging that no-one in SA media had taken the rich data in the crime stats and actually dug deep into it to find narratives and patterns that they weren't spoon-fed, and then along comes Mail & Guardian's Jacques Coetzee and completely undermines my argu...

a year ago

Down with RICA!

Edward Snowden himself was taken aback by the implications of the South African High Court's ruling on the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication Related Information Act (RICA). For most of us, RICA is the thing we do when we hand over ID docs to purchase a ne...

a year ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Dodgy DCMA takes down M&G

Did you miss the Mail and Guardian online the week before (Friday 13 September 2019)? We all did, because the whole site was downed thanks to a crafty censorship attack using America's largely awful Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The DMCA was invoked thanks to an article ...

a year ago

Throw away your chart of charts

It would be a sorry planet if we couldn't argue about the right type of chart to illustrate a particular type of data. Yet there are a whole bunch of good-for-nothing hippies who think chart taxonomies and all those websites which guide designers to an appropriate chart are a waste of time. Fie o...

a year ago