Wrangling Data

“Basic Steps in Working with data” takeaways

• Some takeaways from this article were the three concepts that a journalist needs to understand. 1) “data requests should begin with a list of questions you want to answer. 2) Data often is messy and needs to be cleaned. 3) Data may have undocumented features.”(Doig) This particular point stems from the criminalistic example, that a courtroom could have a person’s information completely messed up, but as long as the person is on time to their trail, everything is fine. The second surprising point from this article, is working backwards in order to have the data answer a journalist’s data point question. However, working backward comes in steps. The first step is listing all the data evidence statements you want to make in your story. And lastly, the second “is to then decide which variables and records the journalist would have to acquire and analyze in order to make those statements.”(Doig)

“Cleaner, Smarter Spreadsheets” takeaways

• My biggest takeaway from this article was the points made for excel, and it’s formatting. The German example showed an example of what a bad excel spreadsheet looks like.
• Excel Point: when making a file that contains data with names, the names should be divided into three separate columns (ie: first name, middle name, and last name.) Within this example, with being coordinated into three separate columns it is more visible to see how many people have the same last name.

World Bank Data: Turkey Female Life Expectancy At Birth (years)

What I Found: There is a steady increase in female life expectancy over the years. In 2000 the female life expectancy was 73.8 years. Whereas in 2009, the life expectancy increased to 82–83 years.