GeoCommons as a Data Journalism Tool

As newspapers look to cut costs more is being asked of reporters. Newspapers with large online presence have teams of interaction designers, data analysts and cartographers. Smaller organizations can’t compete with this type of staffing, but still want to use data to enhance stories. Being that GeoCommons’ goal is to make mapping and analysis easy for everyone it is perfect for journalists looking to do research for a story or to add a map to enhance a story. Let’s see how this might work.

In Washington, DC there is a lot of data provided by the District government through their data catalog. You can download all the 311 requests from 2010 for example, there is even an API for 311 requests so developers can build additional 311 tools. In downloading the requests from 2010 I noticed that there is a field titled “SERVICEORDERSTATUS” and the values are Open/Closed/Overdue. I became interested in looking geographically at where the overdue tickets were versus the total number. I decided to focus on abandoned vehicles for my analysis. I created a subset spreadsheet of abandoned vehicle requests and then a subset of those requests that were specifically overdue. I then uploaded those into GeoCommons as datasets. The full abandoned vehicles 311 request dataset is available here and the specifically overdue ones are here. Once these were uploaded I aggregated the data by Ward, this way I could see where the most 311 requests were coming from as well as the most that were overdue. To further my analysis I calculated the percentage of overdue requests out of the total requests. The resulting map shows significantly more overdue requests by percentage in Ward 7 and Ward 8. This allows me to start asking further questions, if I actually was a journalist maybe I would approach the DC government with this information and see what they said. Perhaps I would interview residents in those Wards for further information as well. Finally when I’ve developed the full story I can include the map I’ve used for my analysis with my resulting story.

I include the map by clicking on the “Details” button.

Next I click the “Embed this map in your website” button, which brings up the map embed code. I can now copy and paste this code into my news site’s content management system.

Many news organizations are already using GeoCommons to help enhance their stories. Ones we’ve noticed have included:

LA Times: California’s Unemployment Rate is Second Highest in the Nation

Calgary Herald: Explore Dog Data in your Calgary Neighbourhood

Huffington Post: How The Economic Impact of the Oil Spill Is Spreading Beyond the Gulf

Atlantic Monthly: WikiLeaks Data on Afghanistan Deaths Visualized

The Roanoke Times: Roanoke’s Population Expands Over Decade

The Vancouver Sun: Worst Intersections: Vancouver

ABC World News Blog: Live Feed of Tweets Mentioning #Egypt #Jan25 #Tahrir

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Census 2010: Racial Breakdown by Geographic Area

Edmonton Journal: Edmonton Public School Attendance Maps

Ottawa Citizen: High Flying Prime Minister Harper Racks up Air Miles: Analysis

Are you a journalist already using GeoCommons and you’d like to be included on the list above? Let us know in the comments.
Did my DC analysis peak your interest and you might want to do a story? Checkout the map below:

View full map