While prepping for my Strata keynote with Simon Rogers, editor at the Guardian Datablog, I had the amazing and unique opportunity to sit with his team for a week and experience first hand how they do their work.

Their work is so important, I wanted to share with you what I learned and show you how you can apply some of their data analysis techniques to your own work.

What does a data journalist do?

One of the pieces of Datablog work that Kathryn helped with on her week at the Guardian was this interactive map of England's academies

You might read the Guardian Datablog day to day, but not really realize what the editor and writers really do. Before explaining what a data journalist does, Simon likes to explain what a journalist does:

•Investigates a story

•Researches the facts

•Writes and reports the story

•Engages with the public

•Reveals and exposes the truth

Now how about a data journalist? What does a data journalist do?

•Investigates a story

•Researches the facts

•Writes and reports the story

•Engages with the public

•Reveals and exposes the truth

You're not missing anything: these lists are identical! The difference lies in the methods and tools that a data journalist uses in their day to day activity.

A day in the life of the Datablog

Let's first take a look at a normal day working at the Guardian Datablog.

The day starts by getting in early and grabbing a cuppa. A morning conference keeps all Guardian teams aware of the current news. After the meeting, it's off to to the races. The fast-paced environment is evident: data for a story might come in at 1pm and the accompanying blog post needs to be out by 4pm. Work can continue even throughout the lunch hour with a sandwich being casually consumed in front of the computer. Stories are published before 5pm, with work then starting on the next day's posts.

What can you learn?

The fast-paced environment means data analysis tools that are quick and easy to use reign supreme. There are really three major steps of the Guardian Datablog's process that drive the tools and resources they use:

•Getting the data

•Telling the story

•Sharing the data

Getting the data

Britain's aid mapped. Illustration: Paul Scruton for the Guardian

After recognizing the important stories, the Guardian Datablog team searches for supporting data. Data is abundantly available online. Popular data sources used by the Guardian include the Office for National Statistics and the World Bank.

The data often can not be used as it is. Entities within the dataset might be named differently (think "City of Bristol" and "Bristol, City of"). These inconsistencies can make the data analysis process impossible! Luckily, there are a couple of handy tools that can help you clean up the data: Google Refine and DataWrangler.

Telling the story

A major part of telling the story includes data analysis. This can be anything from finding a single number to producing a highly complex visualization. The results of the analysis help the community understand the story and the data. What tools does the Guardian use to analyze their data?

For map visualizations, the Guardian likes to use Google Fusion Tables, Google Maps API, and CartoDB. Each tools makes it easy to display custom, styled maps that can be embedded on your website.

For chart visualizations, the Guardian likes to use Google Spreadsheets, DataWrapper, and Tableau. Similar to the map tools, these tools make it easy to display custom, embeddable maps.

Sharing the data

Finally, the Guardian Datablog adds one last important piece to their blog posts: a link to download the raw data. This allows the community to explore the data and find their own stories! It also helps the Guardian Datablog identify errors in the data, as the community comments on the story and notes any possible issues. The team listens to the community and improves the stories.

To share the raw data, the Guardian Datablog often uploads the data to a Google Spreadsheet. With a Google Spreadsheet, the data is hosted in the Google Cloud. No need to upload a CSV to your website.

Now you can think like a data journalist

Armed with these tools, you can now perform the same level of expert data journalism as done at the Guardian. Want to learn more? Watch Simon's and my keynote at Strata London 2012.

• Kathryn Hurley is a developer programs engineer at Google for Compute Engine. Kathryn spent a week (24th-28th September 2012) observing the workings of the Guardian Datablog prior to her keynote at the London Strata conference on the 1st October 2012.

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