A tight housing market, ddj tipsheets, and pivot tables

THE BEST OF THE WEB FOR DATA JOURNALISTS

Nice to meet you!
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A week of firsts... :)

With the municipality elections coming up, I got to work on several ambitious data projects. We published our data story on the tight housing market in the Netherlands (nl)* yesterday. It marks the first time we created 388 stories in one, by adding the option of selecting your municipality. Another first: inspired by The Pudding we used a pivot scatter plot. So proud of my colleagues who did most of the heavy lifting here. :

* Sorry, but Google Translates breaks the graphic, which is the heart of the story...

Give this neural network two sentences and it creates a sentence gradient, the 5 sentences it believes should go in between. Sounds complicated? It's really not, just try Robin Sloan's Voyages in sentence space to see how it works exactly... It's such a wonderful, tech meets language delight. [See image]
Roaming through the project list of the 2018 Data Journalism Awards, I found some data journalism gems: Beyond modern borders, where Marco Hernandez maps various ethnic groups and how these compare with modern country borders - includes a interactive globe (more info); Missing pieces about gun theft quietly fueling violent crime across America (more info); and Funds of lie: campaign financing and criminal networks, where journalists from Ojo-Publico investigated ten years of links between contributors of political organizations and people associated with various crimes (more info).

Oh, and please don't forget to submit your own projects here...!
The annual data journalism conference NICAR enters its last day today. The NICAR tipsheets are shared here, with among others: Python mini bootcamp + slides; abbreviations explained; which charts to use; PDF wrangling, getting the data; and another introduction to Python;
When using pivot tables in Pandas, I always forget how to format my query to get the table I need. This week I stumbled upon this good and thorough explanation.
The Pudding sends you a postcard: greetings from Mars. This elegant postcard compares the weather on Mars with your locale, using data from NASA's Curiosity Rover. The use of the postcards ensures a low threshold, while also making it fun. :)
March 8th was international Women's day. For the occasion I joined the most popular Dutch podcast on tech to discuss the lack of women in tech. (Thanks for having me, had a blast!) Don't understand Dutch? Here's a similar discussion, focusing on women in data.
Carla Pedret shared this nice collection of data journalism productions zooming in on women's issues; like maternal mortality in the US by Pro and the global demographic imbalance. (I never knew, but apparently men outnumber women by 66 million!)

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No really, I want to know. Share your opinion, let me know if you miss something. Or even better, made something that you'd like to see featured here? All of your newsletter and data journalism related thoughts would be super helpful. Beam them to me in email format at winny@datajournalistiek.nl, or just hit 'reply'. Thanks, and happy Sunday!