Making Data Play Nice

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Making Data Play Nice

A guide to cleaning dirty data and making it fit to answer questions

About the Book

Getting data for a story is only the start of the process - sometimes it just won't play nice.

Making Data Play Nice covers the skills to get your data into the right shape to give you answers to the questions you need to ask. Techniques include:

  • Using data cleaning tools including Google Refine
  • Extracting data from data - getting years from dates, splitting postcodes and other common problems
  • Dealing with names - how to deal with titles, middle names and other peculiarities
  • Making data work with pivot tables - tackling headers spread across multiple rows, merged cells and other issues
  • Grabbing extra data using spreadsheets
  • Grabbing extra data using APIs
  • Combining multiple spreadsheets into one
  • Advanced cleaning using Google Refine Expression Language (GREL)

About the Author

Paul Bradshaw
Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw runs the MA in Data Journalism and the MA in Multiplatform and Mobile Journalism at Birmingham City University, where he is an associate professor. He publishes the Online Journalism Blog, and is the founder of investigative journalism website HelpMeInvestigate. He has written for the Guardian and Telegraph’s data blogs, journalism.co.uk, Press Gazette, InPublishing, Nieman Reports and the Poynter Institute in the US. Formerly Visiting Professor at City University’s School of Journalism in London, He is the author of the Online Journalism Handbook, now in its second edition, Magazine Editing (3rd Edition) with John Morrish and Mobile-First Journalism with Steve Hill. Other books which Bradshaw has contributed to include Investigative Journalism (second edition), Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship; and Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives.

His books on Leanpub include Scraping for JournalistsFinding Stories in Spreadsheets, the Data Journalism Heist, Snapchat for Journalists, and 8000 Holes: How the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay Lost its Way.

Bradshaw has been listed in Journalism.co.uk’s list of the leading innovators in journalism and media and Poynter’s most influential people in social media. In 2010, he was shortlisted for Multimedia Publisher of the Year. In 2016 he was part of a team that won the CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards.

In addition to teaching and writing, Paul acts as a consultant and trainer to a number of organisations on social media and data journalism. You can find him on Twitter @paulbradshaw

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