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.

Where did all the green spaces go?

Good news - one of Joe Biden's first acts as Pres of the USA was to rejoin the Paris Accord and commit to environmental goals. Bad news, the planet is in a really rough shape. But all is not lost. Vizzuality's Where The Wild Things Aren't tracks wilderness loss over the 300 years to the millenniu...

a month ago

RStudio’s Rainbow Release

Popular R IDE RStudio's had a pretty big update this weekend, largely focussed on speeding up code production by a visual Markdown editor and much improved support for Python. Be honest, though. What you're really excited about is the multicoloured brackets - or rainbow parenthesis. So pretty. Ge...

a month ago

Happy birthday, Wikipedia

It was 20 years ago today, Jimmy Wales taught the band to play. The band being the internet, and the song being Wikipedia, of course. You may not have seen much coverage of this noteworthy anniversary locally - although internationally the site that killed Encarta is much celebrated. That's partl...

a month ago

Manipulating media in Uganda

Waiting for the results of yesterday's general election in Uganda isn't exactly a nail-biting affair - no sensible bookie would be taking bets on the outcome - for outsiders and fans of democracy there has to be mixed emotions. Museveni's crackdown on opposition parties and their leaders, indepen...

a month ago

In praise of annotations

A picture says a thousand words, but is a mere ten hundred enough? Of course not. Storytelling with Data highlights the importance of adding text to your charts, and the power of the humble annotation to transform a graph into a story. Check it out here.

a month ago

SA ups its Covid-viz game

The fresh start to the new year many hoped for didn't really happen in South Africa, what with lockdowns and booze bans and a second wave/new strain of coronavirus setting new records for detected cases and deaths daily (there are more active cases now than at any point last year - although this ...

a month ago

Grab your tickets for Outlier

The Data Visualization Society is kicking off the new year with its Outlier conference, which starts on 5 Feb and runs over the course of the weekend. It's a virtual event, with 40-odd speakers (and counting) from all over the world (although not a great showing from African countries - down to f...

a month ago

The console war is over and everyone lost

Try as I might to turn my back on the games industry (where I worked for many years), I can't help but be drawn in by stats and news of weird and wonderfully juvenile bugs in new games. Stats like the ones published by Visual Capitalist showing the rise of the mobile phone as the dominant platfor...

2 months ago

Chilli, the diva spice

If you're the type that measures your enjoyment of a dish on the Scoville scale, you'll enjoy this. The Kontinentalist has graphics to cover pretty much everything you could want to know about chilli consumption in Asia, including why certain ingredients just go so well with hot stuff. Check it o...

2 months ago

The meatsacks are superfluous to requirements

There's a well known truism that if you're the type of person who buys stocks and shares, you're better off getting into an index-linked fund rather than trusting a human broker to make purchasing decisions for you. Index funds almost always outperform managed ones, passive investing for the long...

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Find your place in the queue

The first public vaccination programmes against Covid-19 are underway, so the reasonable question to ask is "when will I get mine"? For many of us, the answer is "who knows", but the New York Times is helping out Americans with this neat interactive. Apparently, if I lived in Georgetown, South Ca...

2 months ago

Dominic Cummings, data-driven failure

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, anyone who is capable of getting themselves made special advisor should on no account be allowed to do the job. We're looking at you Dominic Cummings, bete noir of UK in Europe and person who doesn't understand the difference between an eye test and a driving test. Th...

2 months ago

The serious Empire

You don't have to read Cicero to know that the Ancient Romans gave us so many popular words and phrases relating to the sentiment of the crowd which are still in use today. But how did they really feel about life? Abishek Verma has done some sentiment analysis on everyday writings of Roman people...

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Oh no, it’s the Daily Mail

Say what you like about South African media, at least we don't really have a straight analogue for The Daily Mail - no longer the world's most popular news-site, but still such a hateful place of lies, quasi-fascism and blatant sexism that good people don't grace it with links. Amazingly, it has ...

2 months ago

Alberto Cairo’s favourite tools

“If you are able to both write and design the graphics on your piece, I believe you become a better journalist.” So sayeth the master, Alberto Cairo in this interview with GIJN this week. But he's not going to leave you high and dry either, with some low code/no code tips on using Datawrapper, Fl...

2 months ago

The academic news in brief

Are there too many academic journals in the world, and too many articles being published? Far be it from us to complain that there's too much science - it genuinely doesn't feel like that when listening to certain politicians - but we have heard specialists complain over the years that they can't...

2 months ago

Scrollytelling disaster (in a good way)

Starting with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 which put paid to the town of Pompeii and fastforwarding to the 20th Century, Mohamed A Waked has created a short history of natural disasters in scrollytelling form. It's comprehensive - there are over 15,000 events mentioned and the 1,440 whi...

3 months ago

How to report on AI

Is it possible for journalists to report accurately on matters of machine learning, when the question of how to audit decision making machines hasn't been completely resolved even by the people that build them? It's a toughie, and one that was tackled at this year's Centre for Investigative Journ...

3 months ago

Grants and fellowships for female data journos up for grabs

WanaData, the network of female data journalists from around the African continent, is "ending the year on a high" as it puts it, by launching a series of grants and fellowship programmes to help members old and new out with story-telling resources. The range of opportunities is truly impressive,...

3 months ago

The truth is out there

The machine-learning tool for our time, researchers form the University of California have developed an AI that can reportedly tell the difference between a Pizzagate and a Watergate when it comes to the quality of underlying facts. Worryingly, the authors do admit that "someone could use the too...

3 months ago