Numbers to Narrative

Telling stories with Data


Dhrumil Mehta

Database Journalist, Politics - FiveThirtyEight

Democracy and Technology Fellow - Ash Center @ HKS


dhrumil.mehta@fivethirtyeight.com  

 @datadhrumil

@dmil

Database Journalist, Politics

Path

  • Northwestern:
    • BA in Philosophy + Minor in Cognitive Science
    • MS in Computer Science
    • Knight Lab Student Fellow
  • Political Framing + USA Today + APSA
  • MediaCloud & Framing - Berkman Center
  • Software Development Engineer @ Amazon
  • Database Journalist @ FiveThirtyEight
  • Democracy and Technology Fellow @ Ash Center - Harvard Kennedy School

Part 1: The Journey

Day One

Lessons

Month One

Year One

More Writing / Reporting / Picking Up the Phone

Building Software

 

Elections

More Reporting &

Writing  

&

Data

 

Bots, scrapers, watchers, and integrated workflow

Open Data

https://www.datajournalismawards.org/project-listing/?project_id=2082

Code that is journalism - not code for journalism

Reflecting

What's Next

Part 2: Case Studies

Uber

Types of Data Stories

Huge Data Dump

  • Uber
  • Election Results
  • Census

Answer a question with data

Support/Oppose a hypothesis

Identify a Phenomenon

Debunk or Justify Conventional Wisdom

Data-Driven Profile

Lack of Data

Data driven investigative work

Dig for Data

Provide relevant context

Build our own dataset

  • With Code / Scrapers
  • By Hand
  • By Survey Tool

Explain Calculations

Use Innovative Methodology

Use data to inform traditional reporting

The Rare Datapoint

My Lessons

Coding Is Journalism

To What End?

 

dhrumil.mehta@fivethirtyeight.com  

 @datadhrumil

@dmil

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/dhrumil-mehta/​

Todo:

 

Sign up for a Github Account

https://github.com/join

 

Put your username here:

goo.gl/irz33j

 

Familiarize Yourself with the Data

  • What is in this dataset?
  • What is potentially interesting?
  • What do you want to know more about?
  • How can you use this data?
  • What other datasets are similar to this or could be relevant?
  • What is newsworthy?

Brainstorm

  • What makes good stories / good news?
  • Pg 272 of "Elements of Journalism"
  • 3-4 Ideas per pair

Pitch

  • What makes a good pitch?

Pitch

  • What is the story? (1-2 sentences max)
  • How will you tell it?
  • Why this publication? Why now?
  • Through what medium?

dhrumil.mehta@gmail.com

Analyze!

  • Start to do some analysis, see if you can start to answer your questions.
  • Make an outline
    • what will your sections look like?
    • who will you talk to?
    • how can you visualize the data?
    • what is the best medium to tell this story?

Takeaways / Project Discussion