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.

Oh expensive gruntbuggly…

There, in the wood, among trees,He sees shadows on the way, hears voices,hears the wind and the rustling of leaves;Through an open gladeHe sees a shape and the shape hears:It waits as he waits,Waits as the shadows wait,As the voices wait;Shadows on the way, voices in the wind. It's not going to f...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

A shiny new Covid-19 data portal for Latin America

The new Covid-19 Observatory for the Containment of Covid-19 in the Americas isn't your normal coronavirus dashboard. There's no R values or logarithmic expressions of death rates here. Rather, this project from Miami University is looking at the state of public policy and the movement of people ...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Silver linings

Lockdowns are lifting, but if the long term prognosis for coronavirus-related regulations and restrictions has you feeling down, maybe Happy Data can offer a pick-me-up. It's a project which aims to collect data around positive outcomes of the covid crisis, like an increase in volunteering and a ...

a month ago

More machine learning for journalists

There's an emerging body of online resources designed specifically to help journalists master AI and algorithms, and its growing at a fair old pace. The latest entry comes from Google News Initiative and the Pols thinktank at the London School of Economics, and apparently is so sophisticated it c...

a month ago

My Corona, Nerds

Are face masks invisible to algorithms?

The compulsory wearing of facemasks outside your home might be a deeply uncomfortable experience, but at least it's putting a stop to all those insidious facial recognition technologies privacy nuts have been banging on about for years, right? Not so, reckons Karan Bhanot, who's been playing arou...

a month ago

The number of the beast

You don't have to have experienced the Great Migration up close to know that the annual manoeuvres of wild grazer herds is a thing of both great beauty and complete wanton destruction. To understand the former and limit the latter, Australian scientists are embarking on the "world's largest satel...

a month ago

Scraping soccer

It's fair to say that R isn't the language of choice for heavy duty web scraping. but ACDI/VOCA's Ryo Nakagawara has a neat tutorial for harvesting football stats which proves that it's not just possible, but pretty straightforward to do with the rvest libraries. There's some suggestions about ho...

a month ago

Parks and recreashRon

This deep fake is the bastard child of Being John Malkovich and Parks and Recreation. And now that the opening credits have been created, it's also the spin-off show you never realised you needed to see. Swanson, Swanson, Swanson, Swanson. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4xtgfQR9Ozc

a month ago

Every aircrash this century visualised

Longing for the days we can return to zooting about the globe in our flying cigar cases? Maybe this will dampen your enthusiasm - Bavyajeet Singh and Vikrant Dewangan have put together a few charts showing just how frequent air crashes are and when - over the course of a flight - they have happen...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

It was the salmon mousse. And the canapes. And the sausage rolls

Japanese broadcaster NHK has put together a little visual aid showing why large gatherings are a bad idea when there's coronavirus around: at a mock buffet, one diner has fluorescent paint squirted on his palm. During the meal a blacklight is turned on to show just where that paint has spread... ...

a month ago

Spinning the colour wheel

Struggling to pick the right colours for your latest viz? The language of colours can be confusing for folks without a design background, but the colour wheel is more than a rainbow-like delight for changing RGB values. It's a tool for selecting the right tones to convey your meaning, and help re...

a month ago

Finally, My Corona

130m litres of beer to get rid of? Challenge accepted

There's no let up to the anguish on South African Facebook and WhatsApp as middle-class pantries and wine racks run bare of booze, yet will the government listen to their plight? They will not. Prohibition remains in place, and as a result the brewery formerly known as SAB (now AB Inbev) says it ...

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a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Deaths from “unnatural causes” in South Africa are a third lower than normal

The Financial Times has a great piece this morning updating its look at the impact of Covid-19 on national death rates. For most countries covered, it's pretty big. Look: But look at South Africa - the chart actually shows a decline in expected mortality rates for this time of year. It's not surp...

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a month ago

100 maps of Gauteng and more

The Gauteng Regional City Observatory (GCRO) is an unsung hero of South African data collection and analysis. Quietly, it gets on with their work, surveying, reporting and analysisng South Africa's economic heartlands. Occasionally, their work reaches the mainstream media (notably its identificat...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Run, South Africa, run!

It's Lockdown Lifts day (part one) here in sunny South Africa, where 50% of Naked Data is based. And while the stay-at-home restrictions don't change an awful lot for many people, they do bring the blessed relief of being able to walk or run for leisure in the great outdoors for the first time in...

2 months ago

Spicy beans, chill before use

Cold brew coffee used to be a thing, but hot grinding and icing your beans before putting them in the filter is a new one on us. For an extraordinarily deep look at these techniques, and some highly subjective data analysis about what their flavour enhancing values, check out Robert McKeon Aloe's...

2 months ago

Get your data journalism course for free here

There's plenty of resources online for upstart cubs with their eyes on becoming a data-journo, but you're not going to find an introduction that's much better than this. It's the Knight Center's six week course featuring Alberto Cairo, Simon Rogers, Debra Anderson, Duncan Clark, Jan Diehm, Minhaz...

2 months ago

How Reuters is using AI for articles

Polis' JournalismAI has a nice interview with Viktoriia Samatova, the MD of the Applied Innovations Team at Reuters Technology, who is building crazy proof of concept machines that can write the news. Samatova's CV is incredibly impressive - her background is in finance and economics as well as m...

2 months ago

What do people do all day

It's probably not the best time to be looking at US jobs data, given how much everything has changed on an historic scale in the last few weeks. But in the spirit of a) interesting dataviz and b) some context, Beehive's analysis of 20 years of stats and how the workplace is changing is fascinatin...

2 months ago

My Corona, Nerds

Academic analysis of SA’s covid-data shortcomings

There's a strong feeling that the South African government is doing pretty well at coronavirus: last night, a long press conference was called in which graphs were shown to demonstrate that for now, the swift move to lockdown is working (for now being the operative part). South Africa's infection...

2 months ago