My insights on the ‘Hands-On Data Journalism: Techniques of Analysis and Visualization’ via Knight Centre

Course: Hands-On Data Journalism: Techniques of Analysis and Visualization

Duration: (May 31 — June 27, 2021) (Four weeks)

Offered by: Knight Centre

Instructor: John Keefe, CNN

This is a short but focussed four week data journalism course that teaches one module per week. I’ ve been looking for a decent data journalism course for a while and then this popped up in my mailbox. After going through the curriculum, I felt this is relevant to the times we are in and it should be a good course to audit as it would be classified as an advanced data course.

Every one week is one module. The first module looks at teaching us

1.Mastering pivot tables & VLOOKUP with Google Sheets

2.Summarizing data using Pivot Tables in Google Sheets

3.Three crucial steps to mastering Pivot Tables

4.Using Pivot Tables to help clean your data

5.Combining datasets using VLOOKUP

I like the tip of typing in ‘sheets.new’ to quickly open a new google spreadsheet. This module took me around two days to complete and I cleared the first exam with 80% marks. It is a good introduction to using pivots with some clear guidelines.

The second module focuses on “Mining your data with SQL”. The YouTube videos are clear with good sound and John does a good job in keeping you interested in these topics.

For every module, apart from the video tutorials, we also have to go through a few required readings on the topic of the week. Some are basic and some have examples of how News organizations have used that resource. eg: Datasette Examples

The third module goes into a slightly advanced area. We learn about using

Datasette with another application called Glitch. This part will require practice as it is not a easy task. I also tried uploading dataset from WHO on ‘Medical Docs by Sex’ to run some queries but it did not turn out as expected.

You can check what I tried below.

The good part is that there is a lot of interactivity on the forums and we can also reach out to John and ask our specific queries.

Next week — we move to my favorite part. We learn about how to visualise data using datawrapper, a tool that I have been using since its inception.

Stay Tuned!!

(This post will be updated every week until June end, when course ends)