The folks at the Guardian have been doing inspired work with data for several years. Now, they’ve added a new data store–one stop shopping for anyone interested in making data more meaningful. In addition to the data blog that highlights the British newspaper’s own analysis and projects, the new site includes:
• The key data of the day – broken down for you
• Our pick of the data blogosphere – which sites have the key posts?
• Search the world’s government data – and global development data
• What have you done with our data? Featured apps
And there’s more. For journalists, the site is a treasure trove of browsable and downloadable datasets from all over the world, including the United States. You can search by country or by topic area, from agriculture to transportation. There’s also an exhaustive list of specific subjects they have data about, from AIDS to youth justice.
Beyond its utility as a resource, the site’s also worth visiting for ideas on how to visualize data. The Guardian took the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks and plotted them on a bubble chart-map mash-up (above) so you can see where the most traffic was coming from. A simple bar graph made it easy to compare energy consumption in the United States and China on a per capita basis over the past twenty years.
“It’s our job to make the key data accessible and easy to understand,” says Simon Rogers, the Guardian’s news editor. Lucky for us, the paper believes in doing that not just for its own readers but for anyone, including other journalists. Thanks, guys.
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[…] Potter / NewsLab: Data journalism central — The folks at the Guardian have been doing inspired work with data for several […]