Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

Don't Miss, My Corona

South Africa’s Information Regulator weighs in on covid comms

There's a justifiable fear that emergency provisions for using citizen data and geolocating smartphones to track coronavirus patients has dark implications for the future of civil liberties and privacy. University of Johannesburg's Jane Duncan, as ever, outlines the issues and the implications of...

2 hours ago

Hello darkness, our old friend

Even in these tough times, three words terrify South Africans more than any others: "Loadshedding is back". For readers not from South Africa, "loadshedding" is what you call "power cuts", when the powers that be turn off sections of the grid because demand outstrips supply. There's been no loads...

2 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

SA makers build thousands of face sheilds for health and supermarket workers

If you missed Carte Blanche over the weekend, it had just a small number of the many makers and 3D printer owners who've been churning out filters and face shields for essential workers over the last few weeks. Check out the section below and salute them. And if you want to join them, head here. ...

2 days ago

Twenty-four decades of the American Census

I won't go as far as to say that The Pudding has been a bit off lately, but let's just say that an unusual amount of time has passed since we last featured them. The latest offering from this visual essay publisher, however, breaks the drought convincingly with an incredibly detailed yet still fa...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Covid in Kenya – Daily Nation tracks news over time

The data team over at Kenya's Daily Nation launched its coronavirus dashboard a couple of weeks ago, tracking official stats as they are reported across the country. What makes it slightly unusual is the use of Timeline.js to record important news stories over the period of the crisis. The timeli...

6 days ago

Open data and African law

Greg Kempe's work over the years at OpenUp and laws.africa is truly inspirational. Since starting out with Open Byelaws, together with colleagues he's digitised and converted hundreds of documents from all over the region into a simple XML format and stored them in repositories for others to pore...

a week ago

Uganda’s internet tax is crap

Well, we kind knew that, but it's always good to have the data to prove it. Pollicy launched a report this week assessing the effect of Uganda's tax on "over the top" (OTT) internet services (like Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, etc), which was introduced in 2018 and aimed to raise $129m a year for g...

13 days ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Here’s what happened to South Africa’s missing Covid-19 data

There's a potential problem emerging in South Africa's ability to the spread of Covid-19 around the country: poor quality data. Like many of those in South Africa who've been trying to stay on top of government numbers about the spread of the coronavirus, we've been a little confused over the las...

2

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The only corona predictor you need

We've seen many projections about the potential spread of coronavirus in different countries around Africa over the last couple of weeks, some that look convincing, others that seem patently mad. I'm not going to link to any of them because I'm not qualified enough to know which side of the sanit...

2 weeks ago

The most Trumpish of charts

Alberto Cairo's takedown of the signed chart that Donald Trump sent to his followers last weekend is masterful. Trump's chart apparently showed a bounce in share prices following a press conference he gave reassuring the nation about covid-19 - Cairo points out that as the graph only shows a day'...

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

As it spread it led

While millions around the world fear for their livelihoods in the wake of the coronavirus clampdowns, Niemen has confirmed what every one with a passing familiarity with the media knows... bad news can be good for business. Just as we saw with the Trump Bump, certain online news audiences in the ...

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Corona-tracking for South Africa

The Media Hack team -- Laura Grant, Alastair Otter and Tanya Pampalone -- has taken the lead on visualising the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa with its Coronavirus ZA Dashboard. The numbers are based on the government's official announcements, so take it from whence it comes, but on the whole...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

We need a flattened curve hero

Disease and plague stalk the land. Panic and fear grips our hearts and makes us buy all the toilet paper. What we need is a hero, and one has emerged: the Flatten the Curve infographic. In two simple lines, a single image says: "This is why we need to take it seriously, but don't freak out either."

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

So how does disease spread anyway?

The Washington Post's scrollystory on epidemics (Warning: Paywall ahead) explains how diseases spread in a group of people, and shows how to stop an epidemic -- something we wished we all knew a month ago, when this story first came out. But it's still a great explanation of concepts like the bas...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Dragons sitting on their grains of rice

It's extremely hard for us humans to get an accurate sense of very large numbers. The difference between 100,000 and 1,000,000 is hard to comprehend. (Tim Urban's brilliant 1 to 1,000,000 should help you with that). TikTokker Humphrey Yang uses grains of rice to picture Jeff Bezos' $122 BILLION w...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Corona at the data conference

The old adage that you should never become the story is a vain hope for attendees at last week's NICAR conference in New Orleans. NICAR is arguably the big annual event for datajournalists in the calendar. Many delegates will have been looking to sharpen their data interrogation skills to improve...

4 weeks ago

Life is good

Coronavirus and economic collapse got you down? If it seems like the end times are upon us, don't worry - life really is getting better. Or at least it is for members of the OECD, which The Economist regularly refers to as "a club of rich nations". It's just released its How's Life 2020 report, w...

4 weeks ago

100 years of failure (and then there was Trump)

The Trump/Kushner "peace plan" for the Middle East strikes us as one of those things that no-one really takes seriously until it is suddenly the new normal, because we were all too busy getting distracted by the 'flu as it was pushed into law. So you should probably study it more than you have do...

a month ago

There’s a marmot hiding in your map

It turns out mapmakers have a sense of humor, and when they see a familiar pattern in a landscape, they don't always resist the urge to fill in a few lines and create a miniature artwork, hidden in plain sight. They're a bit more accessible than the artworks hidden on computer chips, which you'd ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago