JuxtaposeJS helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and gifs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (grown of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.).

It is free, easy to use, and works on all devices. All you need to get started are links to the images you’d like to compare.

Historical

The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later

Development

See how Manhattan’s new skyscrapers will cast shadows on Central Park

Streets before and after cars

Natural Disasters

Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami

Side-by-Side Look at Destruction and Renewal in Japan
2013 Colorado floods
Hurricane Katrina

Head Shot/Change Over Time

NBA’s oldest players
Kennedy half-dollar

Steps:

1) Find pictures that illustrate a before and after scene. Upload both to your Google drive.

2) Insert the two URL’s

3) Add any additional dates, etc.

4) Copy both sets of code into a post on your portfolio site in the text mode. Publish and send the URL along with the other homework.

“Million, billion, trillion … all big numbers. A trillion is just a bigger number, right? True … but it may be bigger than you think. A million is hard enough to imagine, much less a billion. We need some perspective on what these unimaginable numbers really mean.” — If I Had a Trillion Dollars

Q: How many millions are there in a trillion?

Q: If you were a star newsanchor earning $1 million, how many years would it take you to earn $1 billion?

Task:

1) Identify a number that you believe is important for a New York journalist to know, roughly, by heart. Don’t reveal the number. The class will first attempt to identify it.

2) Once the class has responded, put that number in context. For example, if you were talking about population you might give a sense of growth by offering a number from an earlier decade.

3) Cite the source for your number and why you believe it is credible.

Exercise #2: Harper’s Index

Review the numbers presented in your edition of the Harper’s Index handout and identify one number or set of numbers which you think is particularly revealing. Explain why and whether it/they might be worthy of a more in-depth exploration.

Exercise #3
Operations order
Percent
Mean, Mode, Median
Math for Journalists Quiz

Percent

Pizza Hut overwhelming contributed to Republicans

number / total number x 100 = percent

A percent is part of one hundred, or part of a whole. Percents describe relationships between two numbers that, when used literally, might lack context or be hard to understand. To write, “Jane Brown received 7,542 votes out of a total of 12,165″ may be accurate, but the relationship between the numbers is more clear and meaningful when the percent tool is used: “Jane Brown received 62 percent of the vote.”

Percent of total can show you patterns or disparities in sets of numbers. For example, if you have a data set that tells you that state employees got a total of $3.5 million in raises this year, and you know the governor’s salary for this year and for last year, you can figure out what percent of the total in raises given out went to the governor. You can then compare that with the percent of total that was awarded in raises to, say, clerks at the unemployment office. Thus, by calculating percent of total for a category of numbers, such as salaries, you will identify each employee’s or each department’s share of the budget “pie.” In fact, a pie chart can help you analyze these data or illustrate your news report.

Percent Change

To calculate the percent change:

new number – original number / original number × 100 = percent change

1) (New – old) / old = decimal value
2) Decimal value x 100 = percent change

If your answer is a negative number then this is a percentage decrease.

Rate

total events / total population x “per” value = rate

For the “per” value, choose a round number like 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 or even 1 million, depending on the size of the population. — Poynter U: Math for Journalists

Rate is a very handy math tool when you want to make a comparison between quantities of two things that are not alike. Let’s take an example: murder rates in U.S. cities in a given year. What do we need to know to apply the rate tool to this sort of data? Since murders happen to people, we’ll need to obtain (1) city population in that year and, (2) number of murders in that city in that year. Most data about homicide is published as the rate per 100,000 residents, which allows us to make meaningful comparisons. “Per capita” is Latin, “for each head.”

Normalization vs. Absolute numbers examples

Crime in the subway

“The difference between the total and the per–100,000 number is important not just because it changes the picture. It’s the much more interesting number. The total number of crimes means nothing for the individual. What is much more relevant is how many crimes happen per person, because that provides a much closer estimate of each individual’s risk of becoming a victim. Number 2, 125th St, has over six times the rate per 100,000, and number 5, Broadway Junction, has almost ten times the rate (but less than half the total number) compared to Times Square.”

Daily riders are a good first step when looking at the subway crime data, but there are caveats. The analysis would be much better with more, and more fine-grained, data. How should two cities be compared? Is population the right metric? What about GDP? — “Putting Data into Context”

NYTimes: Geek Appeal – NY vs Seattle

Seattle 139 Starbucks in 2013 but New York had 271 85,000 IT workers in Seattle, compared to 168,400 in NYC

Adjusting for inflation

Generally, if dollar values differ over time by three years or more, a cost-of-living adjustment should be calculated to ensure inflation has been accounted for and the comparisons being made are fair. Change in cost of living adds incredibly useful and accurate depth to news reports.

You can use an automatic Web calculator to adjust for inflation. Just plug in the dollar amount ($1) and the year (1913) and poof, your answer — what that dollar was worth in 2012 — shows up on the screen. There are a few calculators on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. If you plug in the $1 and enter 1913 as your starting point, the calculator will tell you that the 1913 dollar was worth $23.19 in 2012.

– Poynter U: Math for Journalists

Ratio

Ratio is a way of explaining how two similar things relate. Ratios crop up in daily life all the time — in recipes, measurements — and in journalism in stories on elections, sports, education, health and much more. For instance, in a city council race, Candidate Brown got 75,347 votes and Candidate Smith only got 24,994, you could accurately tell your audience that Candidate Brown won by a ratio of 3-to-1. That means that, for every vote that Smith got, Brown got 3 votes.

Order is important in expressing a ratio. If you were in a class that had 5 men and 15 women, you could say that the ratio of men to women was 5-to-15. Or that the ratio of women to men was 15-to-5 or reduce it to 3-to-1. But it’s crucial to keep the objects you are counting or measuring in the correct order.

Ratios are easily confused with fractions and percents, but the numbers mean very different things. For example, if candidate A won an election by a 5:4 margin, that does not mean that candidate A got 4 out of 5 votes. It means that for every 4 votes that candidate B got, candidate A received 5. So, candidate A got 5 out of every 9 votes, or about 55 percent. — Poynter U: Math for Journalists

Distribution — Robert Niles “Stats Guide”

A normal distribution of data means that most of the examples in a set of data are close to the “average,” while relatively few examples tend to one extreme or the other. Let’s say you are writing a story about nutrition. You need to look at people’s typical daily calorie consumption. Like most data, the numbers for people’s typical consumption probably will turn out to be normally distributed. That is, for most people, their consumption will be close to the mean, while fewer people eat a lot more or a lot less than the mean.

Standard Deviation — Robert Niles “Stats Guide”

If you are comparing test scores for different schools, the standard deviation will tell you how diverse the test scores are for each school. Let’s say Springfield Elementary has a higher mean test score than Shelbyville Elementary. Your first reaction might be to say that the kids at Springfield are smarter. But a bigger standard deviation for one school tells you that there are relatively more kids at that school scoring toward one extreme or the other. By asking a few follow-up questions you might find that, say, Springfield’s mean was skewed up because the school district sends all of the gifted education kids to Springfield. Or that Shelbyville’s scores were dragged down because students who recently have been “mainstreamed” from special education classes have all been sent to Shelbyville.

Margin of Error Robert Niles “Stats Guide”

The margin of error in a sample = 1 divided by the square root of the number of people in the sample.

You’ve probably heard that term — “margin of error” — a lot before. Reporters throw it around like a hot potato — like if they linger with it too long (say, by trying to explain what it means), they’ll just get burned. That’s because many reporters have no idea what a “margin of error” really represents.

If a poll has a margin of error of 2.5 percent, that means that if you ran that poll 100 times — asking a different sample of people each time — the overall percentage of people who responded the same way would remain within 2.5 percent of your original result in at least 95 of those 100 polls.

Math for specific story types

Source: Poynter U: Math for Journalists

Calculate Percentages

https://percentagecalculator.net/

Sources:

Poynter U: Math for Journalists
Robert Niles Stats
Data journalism handbook
The process: The inverted pyramid of data journalism
Finding Stories in Spreadsheets

Data & Numeracy Resources

Math for Journalists: Help with Numbers
Beginner’s Pre-Guide to Data Journalism
Data Journalism Isn’t Just a Technical Skill – It’s a Cultural One Too
The Data Journalism Handbook
Mining Census Data for Reporting
American Community Survey Guide
A Compass for Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data
Which Data Tool Should I Use?
Community District Resources & NYC.gov
How Census Race Categories Have Changed Over Time
IRE: A Case for Why Journalists Should Learn Statistics
Math Basics for Journalists: Working with Averages and Percentages
Why Math Matters
5 Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You Every Day
10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals
Poynter: Writing With Numbers
Number and Numeral Writing Tips

1) Identify the images you want to use. Put them in a folder “selects.”

2) Open the audio files in Reaper. Edit together a short 2-3 minute clip.

3) In iMovie, go to File > Project Properties and confirm that the image duration is 4 seconds.  Make the initial Photo Placement > Crop. Drag your images into iMovie. You can order them by selecting the arrow tool and then dragging and dropping.

4) Drag your audio file on top of your images.  If it is too long you can shorten the length but you can’t edit it in iMovie so should go back to Reaper if you want to make edits other than shortening the file. You can add additional files if it is too short. However it is better to edit the two files together in Reaper first.

5) Add text screens by clicking on the T and selecting a type of text screen.  Then you drag the text screen to the place where you want it.

6) Using transitions sparingly. It is the button next to the T. Just use cross dissolve and drag it in between the two images you want to transition.

7) You can create a voiceover by clicking on the microphone.

8) When you are done, go to Share > Export using Quicktime

Tutorials

Apple has a series of tutorials.

Online quizzes offer unique instructional opportunities to engage users with your content. They can be used to test knowledge and to gather user opinions.

Do you need more sleep?

Find the mimic

Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway?

Generation Quiz

Test Your Focus

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

Smoking Gun – Time Waster

WPXI – Detecting a Lie

Gotham Gazette: Plan Your Future Park

This interactive game allowed New Yorkers to plan their own park, making choices that communities all over the city have been facing.

Guess the Dress: Who will what to the Golden Globes?

Poll Daddy

Twtpoll

Example: AP Social Media Guidelines

1) Show where and how something has happened

Tracking the Oil Spill in the Gulf

Some stories are about clearly suited for a map because a big part of the story is about geography, like this interactive that illustrates the estimated amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico and where it has traveled to the shore.

Return of the Wolf
Exterminated as vermin, grey wolves disappeared from the lower 48 in the 1930s. In 1995/1996, the US airlifted 66 wolves from Canada in an experiment to repopulate Yellowstone National Park. By the end of 2008, the northern Rocky Mountain states held more than 1,645 wolves, 1,500 of them living outside national parks.

Texas Wildfires

2)  To make comparisons

How did the votes from one district compare to another? Which state has the highest or lowest teen pregnancies? What area of the city has the highest density of bicycle accidents?

Mayor’s race in New York from WNYC

In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters

These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

How fast is LAFD where you live?

“The Times analyzed more than a million runs by the Fire Department over the last five years and found that what Angelenos can expect often depends on where they live. You can read about the causes and patterns in the Times story.”

Cartogram

3) To show major trends/patterns, change over time

Urban Sprawl from USA Today

Guardian: Executions in the US

• Texas is the big state for executions – with 474 since 1976, followed by Virginia
• California has more inmates on death row than any other state – 721. The state has not had any executions since a 2006 moratorium but procedures are set to restart for Albert Greenwood Brown, whose execution was suspended last year. One problem is that the state’s supply of sodium thiopental has expired
• Texas is only behind Oklahoma if you look at the rate of executions per million population
• Alabama has 43 defendants on death row for every million people

4) To drill down: by state, city, county, borough, zip code, census tract

A good map, like all good data visualizations, provide the big picture first, and then allow us to drill down and examine how the big picture relates to our own personal location/experience. A map with different colored areas is called a chloropleth map. The different colors represent different amounts of a certain variable.  The raw numbers of population growth is valuable and interesting, but percentage change tells us more about impact.

Mapping the Bacteria in New York’s Subways

“Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College sampled DNA in New York City’s 466 open subway stations. They found genetic material from 15,152 different species. Almost half the DNA belonged to bacteria. So far, the scientists have identified 67 bacteria species associated with disease and infections.”

Murder: NYC

Each day, the New York Police Department announces major crimes, including most homicides, in the five boroughs. This data is compiled from those reports, in addition to news accounts, court records and additional reporting. In this feature, viewers can review crime data through various filters in order to discover patterns.

NYC Health Department Ratings

5) Examine causes and effects and reveal interrelationships.

John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera outbreaks in London. In an age where the pathogenesis of disease wasn’t clearly understood, he mapped out each case of cholera, and most importantly, made a correlation with the location of the city’s water pumps. The correlation suggested that water contamination had something to do with the spread of cholera, and the data visualization in the form of the map was instrumental at arriving at the conclusion.

Mapping the riots with poverty

A Liverpool University urban planning lecturer, Alex Singleton, analysed the Guardian’s preliminary data by overlaying the addresses of defendants with the poverty indicators mapped by England’s Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which breaks the country into small geographical areas.

He found that the majority of people who have appeared in court live in poor neighbourhoods, with 41% of suspects living in one of the top 10% of most deprived places in the country. The data also shows that 66% of neighbourhoods where the accused live got poorer between 2007 and 2010. — Guardian, England rioters: young, poor and unemployed

AP National Stress Index

6) Summarize a situation

40 maps that explain the world, 40 more maps that explain the world

B. When stories are not about geography

It may be difficult at first to know whether a map will actually be useful for a reader.  Think carefully whether seeing the geographic distribution of the data is most important.

Sometimes, not plotting your data on a map provides a fresher face on an issue. The Guardian created this interactive feature on gay rights in the US, which groups states in regions rather than presents them in the traditional geography.

Eye Candy: Voted across America

Details: One word on election day

Hate Map

House Big Board – Elections

The Strong Democratic seats are in a column on the left, the Strong Republican seats are on the right, with the leaning and toss-ups seats in-between. So, as results come in throughout the night, you should expect to see mostly blue on the left, mostly red on the right, and a mix of colors in the middle.

Keys to Victory

Resource: When Maps Shouldn’t Be Maps

II. Steps to build a interactive map

A. Identify your data set and the most relevant geographical parameter

Parameters: census tract, zip code, county, precinct, school district, congressional districts, etc.

B. Find the geodata

Displaying areas on maps requires a geographical information — latitude and longitude. If you want to map the different NY neighborhoods depending on their population size, then you need to combine the demographic data with the boundary information for those neighborhoods.

There are a different types of boundary data:

KML: KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is simply a text file that has vector information structured like an XML document. Vectors describe the points and paths of any shape in coordinates so it can be plotted on a map. Google Earth uses KML files.

Shapefiles: A shapefile is a format for transferring geographic data. Shapefiles are collections of three or more files that represent features such as points, lines, and polygons.  Shapefile, is used by commercial GIS software applications such as ArcviewGIS, or its open-source version, QGIS. A shapefile comes in a .zip package, and when unpacked, there are multiple files that describe the geography. Fortunately, you can fairly easily translate shapefiles to KML files for use in Google Fusion Tables using tools like Shape Escape.

Sources of boundary data:

J-school Research Center
NYC Department of City Planning
- Borough Boundaries & Community Districts
- School, Police, Health & Fire
- Census Blocks & Tracts
Census
Bronx blocks
Columbia: NYC KML Files

Download zip file of most commonly used NYC geographic boundary files

C. Normalize

Keep in mind. Sometimes you may need to normalize your data or your map may simply reflect population differences:

Sometimes the difference is subtle but it can be important. Other times both absolute and normalized data will be useful.

Figure 1. Unemployment by ZIP – raw count (not normalized)

Figure 2. Unemployment by ZIP – normalized by total labor force

III. Map Elements

Key map elements include the title, legend, and links to primary sources.  Remember that you are creating content for lay audiences and you should use language that is understandable to non-experts. Give a link to the raw numbers or to the spreadsheet file itself.

Color Brewer is an indispensible resource for finding good gradients and color palettes so you don’t have to become an expert on color theory, color blindness, hue and saturation.

A legend is important to translate the visual (qualitative) information in the map to quantitative information.

IV. Resources

Using Web Maps to Tell Your Story
Amanda Hickman: Mapping
100 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups

V. Previous class data sources

BLS: Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

Crime statistics
Historical crime data

Using Timelines in Stories: Chronology, Context, Clarification, Cause-and-Effect, Patterns/Trends, Retrospective/Biography, Navigation

- Chronology: Describing a series of events minute by minute, day by day, year by year
- Clarification: Making complex or ongoing issues easier to understand
- Context: How does the current event fit into a bigger picture?
- Cause and effect: What series of smaller events has led to this big news story?
- Patterns/Trends/Turning Point: Using past events to show larger patterns or what the future might hold.
- Retrospective/Biography: Plotting the milestones of a life.
- Navigation: Using time as a device for navigating a narrative.

Chronology of events:
Reuters: Times of Crisis – 365 days
ABC: Black Saturday – 24 hours

Clarification/Context/Cause-Effect
Arab Spring

Patterns/Trends/Turning Point
Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines
Top World Cup Players on Facebook, Day by Day
Inaugural Words

How something works:
A Day’s Work, Four Days’ Pay
Tell-all telephone

Biographical timelines:
Timeline of Osama bin Laden’s Life
Nelson Mandela

Narratives navigation:
NFB: This Land
Whale Hunt

Styles: Live Blog, Interactive, Infographics

Charlie Hebdo timeline: how events have unfolded
Largest Bankruptcies

Process

Should I include a timeline in my story?

- Does your story contain a complex series of events that might be better told through a timeline?
- Is there a compelling historical component to your piece?
- Are there key milestones that will show how past events have caused or led to this event?
- Are you doing a profile where a retrospective timeline is appropriate?
- Is the future of an issue the point of your story and would a timeline help suggest trends, future directions?
- Will putting your reporting in a timeline help you explore the issue or help you structure the piece?
- What is the goal of my timeline? Is it complementary or redundant?
- What is the logical breakdown of my timeline: days, weeks, years?

Tools

Tool 1: TimelineJS
DOWNLOAD DEMO SCRIPT

View complete demo timeline

- It has built in support for: Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, and SoundCloud.
- Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline.
- Keep it short, and write each event as a part of a larger narrative.
- Include events that build up to major occurrences. Not just the major events.