links for 2010-10-17

Give the increasing amount of raw data that organisations are pumping out journalists will find themselves vital in making sure that they stay accountable. But I said in an earlier post that good journalists don’t need to know how to do everything, they just need to know who to ask.

Apart from the statistics and geo-locations, the data can also be analysed against social categories (such as occupations – “taxi drivers” or “landlords”) and social places (such as restaurants, pubs, hotels and toilets). Look up on the category “social places”, there were 7 incidents taking place in hotels. And the tag clouds showed the hotels were at Manchester City Centre, Wigan, and Ashley-u-Lyne, and related to drunk, women, abuse, assault, theft.

Yuwei Lin and Enrico Zini took the stage and First Prize for the final police project, a GMP tweet database, and showed a very neat search tool that allowed analysis of certain aspects of the police data (3257 items).