BuzzData | Blog

ATTENTION: THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

buzzdata — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:43:00 -0400

Hey everyone, thanks for following BuzzData and checking in on what we do. A quick update: we recently launched a new redesign for our company website:

http://buzzdata.com

This redesign means that new blog content will now show up at:

http://buzzdata.com/content/blog

Eventually this Tumblr will probably disappear. But you always can keep up with BuzzData’s ongoing adventures in data at our new blog address or on Facebook or Twitter.

Cheers!

-the BuzzData team

We're on our way to SXSWi Accelerator!

buzzdata — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:00:06 -0500

From the press release:

BuzzData Selected as Finalist for SXSW Accelerator Competition

March 9, 2012, TORONTO, ON — BuzzData, a developer of data-sharing software, announced today that it has been selected as a finalist in the News Related Technologies category for the 4th annual SXSW Accelerator competition.

“We’re honoured to have been selected by SXSW,” BuzzData CEO and co-founder Mark Opausky said. “BuzzData is changing the way people showcase their data and communicate the information it contains. Our inclusion in the News-Related Technologies category reflects our success to date with newsrooms looking to produce first-class data-driven journalism.”

SXSW Accelerator is the marquee event of SXSW Startup Village, where early-stage tech companies present innovative technologies in front of influential judges and a live audience. More than 670 companies worldwide submitted to present — BuzzData was one of only 48 finalists selected.

The three-day event will be held Monday, March 12 to Wednesday, March 14. BuzzData presents Monday, March 12, between 12:30pm and 1:30pm, local time. Live streaming of all Accelerator presentations, including BuzzData’s, will be available at the following link:

http://sxsw.com/accelerator/live

———————————————————————————————————-

If you’d like to check up on our CEO Mark Opausky and our EVP of Business Development Nick Edouard’s adventures in Austin this weekend, follow them @Opauszky and @NickEdouard.

Our contest is over, check out the talent!

buzzdata — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:40:00 -0500

Our Best City in the World Contest has come to an end! We’re so excited to start compiling all the submissions and seeing what people came up with. (Backgrounder: in this contest, the Economist Intelligence Unit challenged the world to devise and visualize new ways to rank cities and measure urban liveability.)

You can check out — and in the case of interactive submissions, play with — many of the contest entries which have now been made public on our Best City Contest Topic page (which aggregates all the submissions).

Some screenshots of the most recent submissions (picked for no specific reason):

Very impressive — great job, everyone!

Data: even if it's not big, it should be clever

buzzdata — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:02:06 -0500

I’ve worked with data throughout my career (possibly for my sins). I’m not a data scientist, but even before BuzzData barely a day went by where an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file didn’t end up in my inbox. Sales forecasts, cost-benefit analyses, market research, product test results, benchmark data, P&Ls and other financial data – even my own household budget.

Now, given my role at BuzzData, I also work “in” data – I’m part of the data sector or ecosystem. So naturally, I follow industry trends. Now barely a day goes by without something Big Data-related ending up in my inbox.

Don’t get me wrong – I think Big Data is pretty darn cool. I’m not going to pretend that I know my Hadoop from my elbow, but I recognize the potential of Big Data and understand that Big Data is rightly a Big Deal. It’s not just a “current obsession.”

But I do worry that all the noise currently around Big Data is detracting from a very real problem that already exists for organizations over and above “what to do about Big Data?” What is this problem? Simple: how best to share the data you already have.

I’m talking about your sales forecasts, test results, HR employee lists, your output from Big Data analysis, etc. You’ve done the work creating or curating the data – but how do you share it so that it becomes useful and improves your organization’s collective knowledge? This data might not be big, but it’s important to you and your organization. In fact, Big Data might be compounding this problem: after all, Big Data needs to be turned into yet more data – specifically smaller data files – to become digestible by people and actually actionable. And again, that data needs to be shared.

Just identifying this problem immediately prompts two questions. First, how do we share data today? Well, if you’re like most people, you probably a) email it around or b) put it in a folder somewhere, perhaps using a simple file-sharing platform (like Dropbox or Box) or some form of enterprise collaboration platform (like Sharepoint or Huddle).

Second: Is there anything wrong with sharing via email and file folders? Well, when you open a data file this way, you aren’t shown:

What exactly you’re looking at (all you’ve got is the file name to go on, possibly a bit of a cover note in an email)
How this data was together and by whom
How many versions of this data there are and where they are
Who else is using or has used this data and for what
What the bigger picture is (why are you looking at this?)
What useful information is actually in the data: What other files are associated with this data and how?

This data-sharing problem is perhaps most obvious in government. Open-data initiatives are good for many reasons, not least because they can radically improve internal data-sharing. “One of the reasons governments opened up their data is because it allowed better communication between departments,” Open Knowledge Foundation founder Rufus Pollock told us in an interview in 2011. And he’s right: it’s consistently documented that a high percentage of the initial visits open data platforms receive upon launch are from internal IP addresses.

The bottom line here is that certain types of files – data files (.xls, .csv, etc.) – need context to aid engagement. These kinds of files are inevitably part of a bigger picture, and that’s the real thing that needs to be communicated – the story, if you will, in your data. This is how your data becomes clever.

We’re making things better for anyone who needs to share data with their team, organization or the world. We’ve spoken with a lot of people about their specific issues and possible solutions, and continue to do so every day. We don’t really care if your data is big or not, we just want it to be as clever as possible.

Nick Edouard, EVP Business Development & Marketing, BuzzData

Want to know more about how we’re making data sharing easy, effective and engaging? Check out http://buzzdata.com or get in touch with me directly at nick@buzzdata.com.

Our Best City Contest deadline is coming ...

buzzdata — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:00:05 -0500

Have you been planning to submit a data visualization entry to our Best City in the World Contest and help the Economist Intelligence Unit find new ways to rank the world’s cities? Time is running out — don’t let your chance to win $10,000 slip away.

Submitting your entry correctly involves a few steps; make sure you get it to us properly so your efforts aren’t wasted. Take a few minutes to watch our submission guide video to ensure you know how:

Best City in the World Contest Submission Guide from BuzzData on Vimeo.

How to Enter

First, read the Contest Rules. By participating in this contest, you agree to be bound by these rules. We also suggest that you bookmark this page and the Contest Rules page for future reference; please check back from time to time for any updates.

EIU 2011 Liveability Index

EIU 2011 World Cost of Living Index

Create a new dataset and name it in the format: “Best City Contest - < First Name > < Last Name >.”
a. Upload your new dataset to BuzzData, making it “Private”. See BuzzData Help for guidance on doing this.

b. Add the topic “Best City Contest” to the dataset (mandatory) and start to follow this topic (optional but we recommend it).
Build your project on BuzzData - work on your dataset offline (e.g. mash it up with other, publicly-available data) and re-upload to take advantage of BuzzData’s excellent version control as you get it ready for submission.

Produce a visualization of your dataset, using your visualization tool of choice, and associate it with your dataset. See BuzzData Help for guidance on adding visualizations to datasets.

Create a document (PDF, Word or Pages document) that clearly identifies the best city and explains your approach and the value in your index (e.g. why you’ve weighted it as you have) (max 1,000 words). Upload it as an attachment to the dataset.

When your dataset, visualization and document are ready for submission:
a. Make the dataset “Public”. See BuzzData Help for guidance on doing this.

b. Invite the user “BuzzJudge” to become a collaborator on your dataset. This will confirm your submission.

All submissions (that have invited BuzzJudge as a collaborator) will be considered final at 11:59pm (PST) on March 4, 2012. Any subsequent updates to datasets will not be accepted as part of the submission.

Drum up support for your submission by Tweeting about it, Liking it on Facebook, +1-ing on Google+, showcasing it on your blog or website using BuzzData’s badges, etc.

Best City Contest: only 1 weekend left!

buzzdata — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:40:00 -0500

Our ‘Best City in the World’ contest in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit forges ahead — there’s only one weekend left to submit your entry! The deadline fast approaches: March 4, 2012. If you’ve got data visualization skills and urban design knowledge to show off, don’t let the chance to redefine city liveability and win $10,000 slip past you.

Some quick updates on the contest:

1) Eager data-visualization enthusiasts continue to iterate on the EIU’s liveability data sets on our Best City Contest topic page, mining for interesting and telling trends:

Some very interesting ways of interpreting the data are popping up — follow along and join the discussion!

2) One contestant recently asked us a question regarding climate vs. weather indicators in the EIU’s liveability index:

At “Category 3: Culture and environment” in the document “About Liveability Survey.doc”, the indicator Humidity/temperature rating is mentioned.

This indicator does not appear in the (liveability) spreadsheet, instead there is a “Climate rating” indicator.

Does this indicator relate climate in the sense of weather, and in that case which factors is this indicator taking into account?

EIU Cost of Living editor Jon Copestake clarified as follows:

“The climate category has two indicators: a general comfort indicators supplied by the correspondent and also a quantitative indicator calculated from average weather conditions. The enquirer is right - these are the same indicator.”

To help further clarify, Copestake also passed along the EIU’s climate scoring methodology, which is now found under “Attachments” of the EIU’s contest liveability index data set.

The EIU has been very open to answering contestant inquiries as completely as possible, so do take advantage! If you have a question, ask Copestake directly through a BuzzData private message or ask us at contest@buzzdata.com.

Talk data with us at Social Media Week T.O.!

buzzdata — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:46:00 -0500

BuzzData is hosting a panel talk tonight called “How social data can change the world” at the Centre for Social Innovation (215 Spadina Ave., 4th floor). Come hear speakers at the forefront of data communication talk about:

1) the significance of sharing data and connecting data to people

2) the challenges and risks of the data-sharing business model

3) how social principles are key to driving (and scaling) data-driven innovation

Our panel of speakers:

Glen McGregor (Data Journalist, The Ottawa Citizen)
Motek Sherman (Lawyer / Angel Investor / Media Producer)
Momoko Price (Communications Director, BuzzData)
Kieran Huggins (Co-creator, MyTTC.ca)

More details can be read here. Looking forward to a stimulating evening! See you there!

The Atlantic picks up our Best City Contest

buzzdata — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:09:00 -0500

The Atlantic Cities just posted an interview with one of the judges of our Best City in the World contest, EIU Cost of Living editor Jon Copestake:

Another great related article to read on the subject, also in The Atlantic Cities, is “Why Ranking Cities is Such a Tricky Business,” by Toronto-based Globe and Mail writer John Lorinc, who lays out the pitfalls and oversights that can occur with international city ranking press coverage.

Would love to hear people’s thoughts on the EIU’s new open-market, open-data approach to encouraging new methods for measuring liveability, in light of Lorinc’s piece. With data enthusiasts already dabbling with different techniques on our real-time Best City Contest topic page, things are already getting interesting.

Want to throw your hat in the ring? Watch our submission guide video, and check out the contest details.

-Momoko Price (momoko@buzzdata.com)

BuzzData: making data easy, engaging and effective.

buzzdata — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:45:06 -0500

BuzzData: making data easy, engaging and effective.

Promote your data with our new badges

buzzdata — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:08:00 -0500

Hello and Happy Holidays from everyone at BuzzData!

The new year is fast approaching, but we couldn’t help but push a few more new features to the site before 2011 officially comes to an end. Without further ado, here are the latest and greatest improvements we’d like you to know about:

Dataset and user profile badges to add to your websites

We have just released a set of customizable publishing badges you can now embed into other website(s), thus instantly increasing the visibility and reach of the data you generate.

Whether you want to use them on a personal blog or a company homepage, BuzzData badges make it easier than ever to share your data with the world.

Adding badges to your website requires simply copy-and-pasting a few code snippets into your webpage source code. You can learn all about how to add badges to your website in our new FAQ & Knowledge Base. Try them out and let us know what you think!

Tweet, share and ‘like’ datasets

Now sharing data with your social circle is as easy as a single mouse click. Want your social media followers and friends to be able to download cool data you find on BuzzData? Get the data into the Twittersphere in an instant.

Community Tasks

This is an early-stage community feature we’re quite excited about. Now whenever you create a new dataset on BuzzData, you can write in tasks that you’d like help with from others in the dataset’s Overview tab.

So what? Well, if your dataset is public, it will show up in our new global “Tasks” webpage, located just to the left of the BuzzData search box, along with the tasks you need help with.

The Tasks page is where users can peruse unfinished data projects from around the world that they can contribute to, thus helping the data community work together to achieve their goals.

To illustrate, when creating a dataset:

The global Tasks page is an early-stage feature that will continue to evolve in 2012. We hope you make use of it often and let us know how we can make it better by emailing us at support@buzzdata.com.

Now accepting direct image uploads and video URLs

Have you made a visualization of your dataset on your desktop and want to upload an image or video of it in action? No problem, you can now upload image files directly to the site and view them in our new visualization viewer.

In addition, BuzzData’s visualization viewer now allows you to post and stream videos from a variety of popular content providers such as Youtube, Vimeo and BrightCove, so you can showcase videos of interactive visualizations and other media on BuzzData as well.

Alright that’s it for now! We hope you have a lovely, stress-free winter break and a fun-filled New Years’ Eve!

The BuzzData Team

6 reasons to use BuzzData for HackFest 2011

buzzdata — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:06:00 -0500

Are you ready for International Open Data Hackathon Day on December 3?

This year it’s easier than ever to put your open-data efforts in the spotlight for all to see. BuzzData makes publishing and coordinating your hackathon projects a snap.

Here are 6 great reasons to use BuzzData to organize your HackFest 2011 projects:

1) BuzzData has an easy-to-use interface that non-coders can contribute to.

This is important for making HackFest as inclusive as possible, and engaging journalists, politicians and the general public. It’s all well and good to encourage everyone to participate, but if your Mom doesn’t know how to use ScraperWiki or read Python, chances are you’re going to have a hard time getting her interested in your open-data project unless we lower the tech barrier a bit.

BuzzData lets you publish data with plenty of room to explain its significance, where it came from, and what you plan to do with it in plain English. Anyone can add their $0.02 to your work and join in the discussion. People who might not necessarily know how to make an app with your data could still very easily look it over and come up with ideas on what to do with it next.

2) BuzzData accepts ANY file type under 500MB.

That’s right - BuzzData lets you upload just about any file, as long as it’s under the file size limit. So bring your .pdfs, .docs and GIS data on board — it’s a one-stop drag & drop, easy enough for anyone to use.

3) BuzzData’s versioning tracks who did what to the data.

What better way to show the evolution of a data source from unusable .pdf to a nice clean dataset than by uploading the original source file and adding subsequent versions on top (no need for extra file names or cluttered FTP servers)?

This is also a great way to get a poorly formatted data source online and solicit help from people to clean it up. Just upload it to BD and share it with your community!

4) BuzzData lets you clone and link datasets.

If you see some data on BuzzData you’d like to work on yourself, clone it and build your own Hack Day project with it. By cloning the data, you preserve its connection to the original source, thus helping others keep track of how the data is evolving and where it originally came from.

You can also link unrelated datasets to each other so that others can keep track of which datasets you’re using for a single project.

5) BuzzData has a public API for developers.

For developers who want to pull and update data quickly, BuzzData also has a beta API on Github, which you can use as a no-muss, no-fuss data-storage target for your open-data apps. (BuzzData users can access their API keys under their Profile Settings.)

6) This year, BuzzData has a real-time updating public page for HackFest 2011!

We’ve created a HackFest 2011 (odhd) Topic page on BuzzData! Now when you publish ODHD-related datasets you plan to work during the event, you can tag it with the “HackFest 2011” topic and it will be added to this page, which you and your friends can follow to stay updated on the day’s developments.

Are you excited yet? We are! Get moving and get your HackFest 2011 data & projects on BuzzData!

Learn all about how to use BuzzData to put your data projects in the spotlight.

And don’t forget to tag your data with the ‘Hackfest 2011’ topic on BuzzData so it gets added to our live HackFest 2011 activity feed and public page!

Have fun on Hack Day!

The BuzzData Team

Upload any file type and annotate your changes

buzzdata — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:06:05 -0500

We’ve pushed through more changes to BuzzData, making it more versatile and vibrant than ever. Take a moment to sign in and see what’s new . Don’t have time right now? Here’s a quick rundown of our latest and greatest new features:

i. Upload any file type — yes, any file type — to BuzzData

Working with GIS or RDB data? Stuck with a PDF and need to request help scraping it? No problem. If it’s under 500MB, we’ll accept it.

Previews of your data wiill still be limited to tabular data only (.xls, .csv, .tsv), but will be available for more formats in the future.

ii. Annotate the latest changes to your data

BuzzData now prompts you to add release notes every time you update a new version to your data, so your team can easily keep track of how your data is evolving. Why email spreadsheets and lose track of your workflow? Drag, drop, annotate and invite. It’s just that easy.

iii. Use @username to direct your comments and replies

We all know how convenient @username tagging is for communicating with our friends online. Now you can ensure the right person gets your message the same way you would on Facebook or Twitter.

And here’s more news from BuzzData:

Deadline for our latest data-storytelling contest is Dec. 2!

Can you spin stories out of data? Prove it! This month’s contest includes prison contraband data, U.S. election disbursement data and Canadian charity tax filing data. Who wouldn’t want to crunch it?

Read this to see which datasets have been selected for story-telling and how to register and submit your work.

Looking for data? Check our BuzzTopics!

BuzzData now has nearly 1,000 staff-curated datasets available for those people looking for clean data to mash up, visualize or just have on-hand. For the full list of topics, read this.

Okay, that’s all for now!

The BuzzData Team

Mournbots, Poppy Files and Veterans' Day-ta

buzzdata — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:34:00 -0500

Digital newsrooms at the Ottawa Citizen and OpenFile decided to use technology to help connect their readers to our war-torn past this Remembrance Day.

@Wearethedead is a bot created by Ottawa Citizen data journalist Glen McGregor that tweets one fallen Canadian soldier on the 11th minute of every hour. Excluding any updates from today onward, it will take 13 years to tweet the entire database.

You can read more about how McGregor came up with the idea in the Ottawa Citizen blog post here.

Each tweet includes the name, position, date and location of death, and age of the soldier who died.

OpenFile’s Poppy File is a data-driven historical retrospective on Canadian veterans that has blossomed from a simple map only a year ago into a beautiful, popular interactive series that allows viewers to discover the identities of soldiers killed in war who once lived in their neighbourhoods, in addition to touching personal narratives and summary charts.

Lovely to see newsmedia using technology creatively to help us connect to an increasingly distant past.

-Momoko Price

Explore hundreds of datasets with BuzzTopics

buzzdata — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:05:00 -0500

Have you joined BuzzData and then gotten a bit stuck because, well, you have no datasets to work on yet? Don’t fret — we heard you.

We don’t want users who are intrigued by (but new to) data to be held back, and so took it upon ourselves to track down, collect and clean up BuzzData-curated public data for you to play with and explore. BuzzTopics will be a treasure trove to info-viz enthusiasts especially, who want good clean data with which they can hone their evolving viz-tool skills.

We will be focusing on building our discovery and search capabilities further on down the line (we know it’s a bit of a thorn in people’s sides right now, don’t worry, we’ll get to it), in the meantime you can get the full list of BuzzTopics available by searching for “Buzz” in the search box at top right:

“We made sure that we were going to all the right places, to publishers that had high-quality data,” says BuzzData business analyst Anthony Ilukwe, who published nearly a thousand datasets with the help of three others in a fairly short time span.

Below is the full list of BuzzTopics so far — this is just a start and it will continue to grow. And if you have requests for data, ping us at blog@buzzdata.com and we’ll track it down. Have fun!

BuzzEducation

55 Datasets, including: Lists of Colleges & Universities, Periodic Table of Elements, List of U.S. presidents & more.

BuzzGeography

10 datasets, including: coastline per nation, tallest mountains, highest & lowest points per country.

BuzzBusiness

184 datasets, including: GDP per nation/industry, government subsidies & employee compensation per industry, cost depreciation of durable goods, etc.

BuzzCanada

22 datasets, including: population by year, aboriginal income, language prevalence, certified organic products, charitable donations by province.

BuzzDemography

26 datasets, including: global populations, birth and mortality rates, urban data, age demographics by country, migration rates; literacy data.

BuzzEnvironment

34 datasets, including: CO2 emissions per fuel source, threatened plant and animal species, forest area.

BuzzNYC

55 datasets, including: locations of daycare centres, water fountains, showers, firehouses, subway entrances, etc., birthnames of NYC citizens, district demographics.

BuzzGolf

3 datasets, including: strokes by golfer, pro career earnings, driving accuracy.

BuzzAuto

15 datasets, including: fuel efficiency by model and manufacturer, vehicles in circulation by country, car production per country.

BuzzScience

12 datasets, including: volcanoes around the world, the Periodic Table of Elements, inventions and discoveries; list of constellations.

BuzzMovies

27 datasets, including: cinematographer earnings, bestselling DVDs of all time, worst movie by viewer rating.

BuzzSoccer

55 datasets, including: player discipline by year, top scorers by year, World Cup and Euro Cup winners.

BuzzCricket

53 datasets, including: batting averages, series results.

BuzzRugby

38 datasets, including: Guiness Premiership, player stats, Six Nations results.

BuzzHealth

20 datasets, including: life expectancy, infant mortality rates, HIV/AIDS prevalence, birth and death rates.

BuzzChicago

15 datasets, including: crime incidents, sex offenders, locations of hotels, health clinics, police stations, community centres, etc.

BuzzWeather

150 datasets, including: monthly average weather by various regions.

BuzzHistory

10 datasets, including: most populous cities at different periods in time, lists of U.S. and Canadian leaders.

BuzzHockey

56 datasets, including: draft entries by year, Stanley Cup and other trophy winners.

BuzzEngineering

14 datasets, including: conversion tables, engineering industry demographics.

BuzzFootball

52 datasets, including: passing, receiving and rushing leaders by year, standings, offense and defense statistics, Super Bowl MVPs.

BuzzCalifornia

22 datasets, including: vacancy rates, state revenue, list of schools and hospitals, electricity consumption, fatal collisions, race and ethnic projections, employment data.

-Momoko Price

Change the data, change the economy

buzzdata — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:40:24 -0500

Fantastic article (as usual) on the Guardian Datablog today — Simon Rogers and his team illustrate how the prevalence of poverty in the United States has gone up nearly 6.5% now that the U.S. Census Bureau has updated its evaluation methods.

Read the full article and see the visualizations

While the Fusion Tables map is cool, the clustered-column chart comparisons of how poverty has increased or decreased by age group, region and more is very illuminating. Definitely worth a full read.

-Momoko Price

Now you can track teamwork on BuzzData

buzzdata — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 05:01:00 -0500

Over the next month or so we’ll be releasing waves of subtle improvements and rearrangements to BuzzData’s design, meant to improve team collaboration and user interaction as well as general data workflow. Take a moment to login and play around — we’d love to hear what you think of our ideas!

This week, new features on BuzzData include the following:

1. Collaboration metrics

Under the Admin > Collaborators tabs of your datasets, you’ll now see a collaboration metrics log that will keep you informed of who has been the most active and least active on that dataset. In addition, users, collaborators and viewers now all have the option to remove themselves from a dataset, if they so choose. (No need to always wait on the dataset owner to get things done!)

2. Alternate file type access

When you go to download a dataset, BuzzData now gives you the option to select between either an .xls file (with the original file formatting) or a clean, plain-text .csv file (which can come in handy for uploading raw data to other third-party apps and tools).

3. Linked Datasets

When creating a dataset, you now have the option to link that dataset to any other public dataset on BuzzData, making it easier to keep track of which ones are related. You can find the option to link datasets to each other in the Overview tab.

4. The ability to delete (almost) anything

Users can now delete posted attachments, visualizations, and articles, in addition to comments and replies. Users can delete any activity they were responsible for. Dataset owners as well as collaborators can now both curate activity on a given dataset, rather than owners alone.

5. Immediate API key access

BuzzData’s beta API is now readily available for all registered users on BuzzData — no request for a key required. To get your API key, simply go to My Profile > Settings and scroll to the bottom of the page. You should see your API key listed underneath your avatar.

-Momoko Price

Have you tried BuzzData yet? What are you waiting for?

Datasets for next storytelling contest are up!

buzzdata — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:37:00 -0400

Can you spin stories out of data? Prove it.

It was hard to keep the datasets limited to just three this time around, with so many users releasing some very intriguing data in the last week. We managed to whittle the list down to a few key datasets recently published by some news outlets and journalists.

Without further ado, here are the rules and data for our second monthly data-storytelling contest:

THE GOAL: To tell the story behind the data through your own BuzzData project

THE RULES: The number of data sources you can include in your project is unlimited, but you must use at least one of the following, and you have to include all data sources used in your final submission.

THE DATA:

1) B.C. Prison Seizures, 2008-2010

Published by: Chad Skelton: Vancouver Sun investigative reporter, specializing in FOI requests and data journalism.

Description: “Data obtained from the Correctional Service of Canada by The Vancouver Sun through the Access to Information Act, detailing all seizures of contraband and unauthorized items in B.C. federal prisons between January 2008 and October 2010.”

2) 2010 Canadian charities tax filings, selected columns

Published by: The Globe and Mail: Canada’s national newspaper

Description: “The Globe and Mail has set out to measure the state of philanthropy , and part of that has involved examining data filed by Canadian registered charities in their tax returns. The Globe and Mail obtained complete databases for the years 1997 to 2009, and partial data from 2010 (data from about 20% of the country’s charities hadn’t been processed by the end of July, 2011). All of the data, maintained by the Charities Directorate of Canada Revenue Agency, is available to the public by law.”

NOTE: We are currently in the midst of trying to get the entire charity database online in a non-.mdb file format, such that projects needn’t be limited to querying specific columns or years or require MS Access to query all the data. If/when we do so, we will update and notify participants accordingly.

3) 2011 U.S. House Election Disbursements

Published by: Matt Stiles: Data journalist at NPR.

Description: “The data reflect campaign disbursements by candidates for U.S. House of Representatives from Jan. 1, 2011 to Sept. 30, 2011. The data only include direct expenditures by federal campaigns, as reporter to the Federal Election Commission — not transfers to other committees or repayments of loans or campaign contributions to other candidates.”

THE DEADLINE: Midnight EST, Friday, December 2, 2011

HOW TO REGISTER AND SUBMIT YOUR ENTRY:

1. To register: Clone one of the datasets above directly from the publisher on BuzzData. (Make it private if you don’t want the public to see it until it’s ready.)

As early as possible, invite me (Momoko on BuzzData) as a viewer by going to Admin > Collaborators of your clone, writing in my name, selecting “viewer,” and clicking “Add”, like so:

2. Over the next month, build your project on BuzzData (posting links and viz’s as appropriate).

3. When it’s done: note in the Overview which visualization/article/attachment is the final product(s), then, before deadline, invite the original data publisher to check it out. And don’t forget to make it public if you want to show it to the world!

4. Tweet and link to your project elsewhere if you want to build interest in it (optional, but always a good idea)

If you’ve never used BuzzData before, here’s a quick video that shows how to start, build and submit your data project:

-Momoko Price

Have you tried BuzzData yet? What are you waiting for?

Got questions? Message me directly.

How to map in Fusion Tables: a basic tutorial

buzzdata — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:17:00 -0400

In the last tutorial, I showed how to scrape data off a website. This time I’m going to show how to make a basic heat map in Fusion Tables using GIS data. (Heat maps are very en vogue right now.)

Before I start, I do want to point readers in the direction of NYTimes graphics editor Matthew Ericson’s fantastic blog post that came out a while ago called “When maps shouldn’t be maps.” Using several examples, Ericson illustrates a great point: just because data can be mapped, doesn’t mean it should be mapped. (On that note, I will fully concede that trends in the data I use in this tutorial would probably be best visualized in a bar chart, not a heatmap, but it’s data I had on hand!)

Onwards!

Okay, making a map in Fusion Tables requires three things:

1. A shapefile (which is actually a folder with at least four file types in it: .shp, .dbf, .prj, and .shx). You can download your own copy called wards_may2010.zip under “Attachments” from the city’s water billing dataset on BuzzData.

2. A tabular data file whose quantitative data is binned into geographic regions — specifically, regions that correspond to those marked in your shapefile. You can use the cleaned-up copy I made of Toronto’s water consumption data from my clone here.

3. A column of data whose cell inputs — including the header — are exactly identical in both the above shapefile and the tabular data file. (This is the column Fusion Tables matches up to make the merged data table on which your map will be based.)

Got your data? Got your motivation? Then follow the step through this video tutorial and you’ll have your first Fusion tables heatmap ready to go.

And voila!

If you still have questions, feel free to ping me and I’ll help you out.

-Momoko Price

Have you tried BuzzData yet? What are you waiting for?

Seven billion oil consumers and counting ...

buzzdata — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:51:00 -0400

You’ve probably heard the news: today isn’t just Hallowe’en, it’s “World Population Hits 7 Billion Day,” too. A day of celebration as well as solemn reflection, to be sure: Seven billion is a lot of mouths to feed. You can almost hear Mother Nature’s knees buckling under the weight of so many children.

To mark the day, BuzzData has collected and published a dataset of key population and resource consumption markers since 1950, which you can download and, if you like, contribute to.

When it comes to concerns about overpopulation, media tend to focus on the spectre of resource exhaustion. In that vein, I thought it might be interesting to explore whether or not the consumption of the world’s most sought-after resource (oil) has grown in step with global population, by visualizing some of the data (see above).

The visualization itself isn’t that compelling — until you calculate the rates at which each factor is growing, that is. You can do this pretty effortlessly by inserting your data into annual growth rate calculators for financial investments. (Clever, no?)

According to the data (and my back-of-the-napkin calculations), as staggering as the world’s population is to date, it’s in fact not the only factor driving the rate of oil consumption. Since 1950, our daily oil consumption has been increasing more than 2.5 times faster than our global population has been growing. Yowza.

Can you do something with this data? Add your $0.02!

-Momoko Price

Congrats to contest winner Martin Madginier!

buzzdata — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:45:00 -0400

Congratulations to Toronto-based business analyst Martin Madginier for winning our first local data storytelling contest! As winner, Madginier gets a prestigious and highly coveted $100 ITunes gift certificate ;) Don’t spend it all in one place, Martin (oh, wait …)

Magdinier’s submission won on its merits of accuracy and rigorous methodology, which he explained at length at our meetup earlier this week. While not visually or aesthetically dazzling, his graphs, compared with less sophisticated crunching of the dataset (admittedly done by yours truly for beginner tutorial purposes), demonstrate how data mining results can vary widely from one end of the spectrum to the other, depending on how you drill into the data.

Realizing that the best way to evaluate water consumption levels across wards would be to compare water consumption per ward population size rather than number of accounts, Magdinier tracked down and manually scraped both 2001 and 2006 census ward population data off pdf files available on the City of Toronto ward profile web pages.

Rather ingeniously, to estimate interim year population numbers, he used compound annual growth rate calculations — a standard financial tool used to estimate the annual growth rate of an investment over a set period of time. He then applied the calculations across all age groups and published his full, cleaned-up population dataset on BuzzData to accompany his main project.

Rather than presume that population size from one year could be applied to water consumption in other years, Magdinier also made the prudent decision to only mine residential water consumption data of years for which he had population numbers, then calculated each ward’s average residential water consumption across those years, from 2001 to 2006.

In his first visualization, he plotted each pair of geographically adjacent wards (he decided that visualizing pairs of wards as distinct points reduced noise on the page) as a scatterplot of ward population vs. average annual residential water consumption.

By scanning horizontally across the graph, it’s startling to see how consumption rates can differ between wards with near-identical population sizes. For example, Scarborough Centre’s residential water consumption is about twice the level of Toronto Centre Rosedale, and some wards, such as Etobicoke-Lakeshore, appear to consume more than four times as much water as others such as Don Valley East, despite having a smaller population size.

Moreover, these findings are in stark contrast to initial results from my own basic visualization tutorial blog post, which only used residential account and consumption data, resulting in Centre-Rosedale and Trinity-Spadina standing out — misleadingly — as the city’s highest water consumers.

Another interesting trend Madginier uncovered in his second graph is that water consumption appears to decrease as the average number of people sharing an account per ward increases. This was calculated by dividing population size by number of accounts per ward and then averaging those values over years 2001-2006.

All in all, some bang-up data-mining, Mr. Magdinier! Would love to see a touch more aesthetic pizzazz next time to highlight the strongest trends (importing into Illustrator is great for this), but in general a wonderfully thorough effort. Thanks for submitting your work!

Also, for those interested in learning more about how to hack data, Madginier has his own blog on how to make the best use of Google Refine, a powerful data cleaning tool. Check it out!

-Momoko Price

DATASETS FOR OUR NEXT CONTEST (DEADLINE LATE NOVEMBER) WILL BE PUBLISHED OCT. 31 (AND BELIEVE ME, THEY ARE JUICY AND GIANT. STAY TUNED)

Have you tried BuzzData yet? What are you waiting for, silly?