, a data journalist writing for dataninja.it, has taken to heart the call for living up to best practices as a data journalist. He explains how he and his team went about creating the interactive data visualization below, which shows buildings and properties the Italian government has seized from the Mafia, region by region, including to whom they belong and what the Government is doing to give them back to Italian citi­zens.

 

Mauro credits Data Visualization expert Alberto Cairo, who recently published an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab website, titled, “Data Journalism needs to live up to its own standards”, as his inspiration both for aiming for greater accuracy in the data journalism and for transparency in describing his methods.

Here is how he described what he and his term learned in the process of creating this data visualization: [NOTE: this callout is taken directly from the source article, all original grammar and spelling has been left intact.]

Regarding skills and acti­vi­ties developed:

  • Data (and sto­ries) mining – It was a big chap­ter of the inve­sti­ga­tion: we did it on offi­cial docu­ments and also on the web for poin­ting out the mat­ching results and sta­ti­stic with data scra­ped from Public Agency of Confiscated Goods. Sometimes you needs to be picky for under­stan­ding in which step the good is (sei­zed, con­fi­sca­ted, free­zed by law acts, assi­gned to some NGOs)

  • Coding and Geo Issues — For sho­wing con­fi­sca­ted goods on a map, we’ve nee­ded of deve­lo­ping a visua­li­za­tion tool: it was made by Alessio Cimarelli, using only open­source tools (Leaflet, D3js, OSM Nominatim and others). Data are sho­wed on the Italian regions by abso­lute values and not nor­ma­li­zed by popu­la­tion or by other dimen­sion, because we aimed to draft a kind of raw over­view: where the Mafia spent the money, what are the dif­fe­rence bet­ween big cities and small towns, for instance by mat­ching the North and the South.

  • Content Curation — We thin­ked that every con­fi­sca­tion should already told by every new­spa­per, as well. Starting from this idea, we’ve poin­ted out and aggre­ga­ted all of sin­gle sto­ries by each regions and from the new­spa­per archi­ves, and regar­ding the most impor­tant boss to whom goods are con­fi­sca­ted. Walking down this way (and after mat­ching results with quan­ti­ta­tive data) you may draw an over­view by kind of mafia (e.g., Mafia, Camorra, Ndrangheta), sho­wing a kind of distri­bu­tion by regions.

  • The Review Process — Working in team is very hel­p­ful for poin­ting out mista­kes, but the bet­ter way in my honest opi­nion it was of sha­ring the drafts of the arti­cles with other mem­bers of the pro­ject (as usually it does with books of researches).

To read the complete article, please go to http://en.dataninja.it/making-off-confiscated-goods-what-we-did-for-making-better-our-data-journalism/

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