Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Book learnin’

Dodging dung with data

I'm vainly holding out hope that physical copies of Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West's new book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World will make it to these southern shores, but will likely give up and order an electronic copy if it takes much longer. It kicks off with the t...

yesterday at 07:05 am

Book learnin', Datum, Nerds

Awesome data!

If you're looking for great datasets to play with, look no further: a massive (and constantly growing) list on Github called Awesome Public Datasets currently features hundreds of datasets. (I considered counting them, but nah...) If you have an awesome dataset you'd like included, send a pull re...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Making our visualisations accessible

Alt-text is that HTML element I keep skipping when uploading images, for instance to this site. But I'm leaving my readers that rely on screen readers in the lurch, effectively making large parts of my site invisible to them. And while I'm at least aware of alt-text for images, I hadn't ever cons...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Chart colours for brand bunnies

No, this is not just another tool or blog post about choosing colours for charts. Amy Cesal deals with the complexities of finding a colour palette that works for a company's corporate identity kit, keeps in-house designers happy, and still doesn't look shit. With any luck, your colour choices wi...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Those who can do, teach

Rebeca Pop, founder of data viz lab Vislogue, interviews some of the data visualisation industry's superstar educators, to find out what they teach, and how. This is a great primer for anyone looking for an education in data viz, or anyone looking to teach it themselves. And just FYI, Alberto Cai...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The font of all knowledge

There's reams of information on picking the right colours for your data visualisation, but hardly any attention is ever given to the equally-important font choice. Data vizzer Tiffany France comes to the rescue with this excellent break-down on choosing font styles, weights and colours for differ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months 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...

2 months 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...

3 months ago

Book learnin', Don't Miss

Don’t be fooled: The journalist’s guide to foiling fake news

Craig Silverman has wrangled some of the industry's top fact-checkers and myth-busters to produce the latest version of the Verification Handbook For Disinformation and Media Manipulation, a veritable trove of methodologies, practices and examples to help the journalist separate fact from crap.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 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...

3 months ago

Machine learning for the newsroom made easy

There's plenty of online resources for journalists who want to learn how to wrangle data for their stories, but courses can feel a little irrelevant when the examples involve iris petals or decades-old fuel consumption data. Investigate.ai is different. Not only is it delightfully "non-threatenin...

4 months ago

Book learnin', Nerds

Learn D3 today (well, probably not all of it today)

If you've suddenly got time on your hands, you're looking to learn something new, and if you're honest with yourself you're not actually going to start yoga, then check out Mike "The Legend" Bostock's intro to the graphing library that rules the interwebs, D3.js, at https://observablehq.com/@d3/l...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

Book learnin', My Corona

John Hopkins teaches epidemiology for all

As we are repeatedly at pans to point out, we're not epidemiologists here at Naked Data, but we could be. With time to fill in self- or enforced-isolation over the next three weeks, it makes sense to sign up for this free course offered by coronadata-meisters at John Hopkins University. It's call...

4 months ago

Florida Man gets data scienceing

If you want to live somewhere warm AND study data science, Miami University has something just for you: the legit-sounding Miami Institute for Data Science and Computing. It's got the usual ML and AI stuff, but encouragingly, there's also a data ethics programme, lots of talk about reaching out t...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

Book learnin', Nerds

So you wanna be a data visualiser? Learn it from a book.

So many books, so little time. And money. And attention span. But if you've got some or all of those spare, data vizzer JP Hwang has an awesome reading list for you, a veritable shortcut from data dunce to visualising virtuoso. Some might already be familiar to you, like Claus Wilke's Fundamental...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

Book learnin', Don't Miss

Ye olde Chaucer

I have a terrible confession to make: I've never read Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales looms over me like a black crow, cawing cruelly, but flying away whenever I approach. (I assume this is the kind of stuff I'll find in the Tales, but having never read them, I really don't know.) And here our tale...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Book learnin', Nerds

Their favourite tools

I'm loving the Global Investigative Journalist Network's current series, My Favourite Tools, in which (as you may have ascertained already) investigative journos share their best apps, gadgets, and software. Lionel Faull's ode to his Livescribe Echo Recorder Pen makes me want to go and buy one im...

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago

Going back to basics

If you thought reading a text only newsletter about data-driven storytelling and other interesting stuff was retro, you haven't seen Market Cafe Mag. It's a print-only compendium of dataviz examples and insights around visualisations on issue-themed subjects which -- as if the name wasn't deliber...

9 months ago