OpenNews/hackdays/storyandalgorithm/jAngels

Project name: jAngels: Visualizing Journalism Angel Funding

Your team: Lisa Williams, Erika Owens

Project URL(s), if applicable: None yet Hashtag, if #relevant: #storyhack

What is it? jAngels will take funding data for nonprofit news tools (and perhaps sites) and provide a timeline to show trends in what gets funded.

Who is it for: Eric Newton. Corey Ford. Okay, and maybe my mom.

Your goal for this weekend: I'd like to load the data into a timeline and see what happens.

Your starting point: I'm using data I collected myself along with data from J-Lab on journalism funding, and visualizing that with Timeline Setter, a Ruby-based timeline generation tool originally created by the ProPublica data team.

Current Progress

Hey! I actually managed to stuff the data into a timeline. What I discovered, though, is that it's probably the wrong tool for the job; TimelineSetter does poorly when you have a lot of data points at the same point in time (the individual funding events are just denoted by year: 2008, 2009, etc). I'm currently thinking of trying out the same data using an animated bubble chart, using D3.js, which has been used for the same purpose by the NYT, for example.

I will be writing about the process of getting Timeline Setter working.

Previously: I've managed to get Timeline Setter up and running. I wrote about the process at my learn-to-code for journalists blog, Life and Code: Yak Shaving, Magical Incantations, and Data Journalism.

• How is this project useful? It's useful to funders because it gives them the ability to see if what they're funding actually matches with their own gut feeling about what they should be funding; it helps people who would like to get funded figure out where they should focus their energy if they want to try for nonprofit funding.

• Where is this project going and what lessons/concepts can be applied to other projects? My main motivation for doing this project was actually to gain technical skills. I wanted to be able to get a Ruby environment up and working, and be able to use some previously written pieces of code to interact with datasets I had lying around that I thought were interesting but would be more accessible in a visual format. In general, I don't think that a project being perpetual in nature makes it a better project. All pieces of music end; all movies end; if they didn't, they'd be unbearable.