Dhrumil Mehta
Database Journalist, Politics @ FiveThirtyEight
Hello, my name is...
Dhrumil Mehta (he/him)
Associate Prof. of Journalism @ Columbia U.
Deputy Director of Tow Center
Visiting Associate Prof of Public Policy @ Harvard Kennedy School
dhrumil.mehta@columbia.edu
@datadhrumil
@dmil
Tow Center
What is Data Journalism?
Empirical Social Science on a Deadline?
Types of Data Stories
Counting Stuff
Answer a question with data
Support/Oppose a hypothesis
Identify a Phenomenon
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
Archiving Data
Explain Calculations
Use Innovative Methodology
Use data to inform traditional reporting
The Rare Datapoint
Challenging Official Data
Huge Data Dump
- Uber
- Election Results
- Census
Acts of Journalism
Data-Driven Storytelling
Data Scraping / Cleaning / Structuring
Building a Database
Visualizing Data
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
News Quiz
Bots
Internal Workflows
Bots
Lets readers see results that FiveThirtyEight deems unexpected
Expectations are calibrated before results ever start coming in.
Open Data
https://www.datajournalismawards.org/project-listing/?project_id=2082
Forecasting
Quantitative Editing
Types Of Data Stories
By Dhrumil Mehta
