This is part 1 of an occasional series looking at useful tools for journalists. You can find the rest of the series here: The Journalism Toolbox
As the world of journalism changes many journalists are looking to learn new skills; skills better suited to an industry

Laura Grant and I have just finished a brand new data and visualisation project on the effect coal has on carbon emissions in Bric countries. The data part was all the work of Laura while I spent a lot of time scratching my head of D3.js code (I’m still no expert but I learned a lot).

In the world of data visualisation d3.js is the toolset of choice for most interactive journalists. But D3 also comes with a steep learning curve that makes it relatively inaccessible to the average journalist with just a small amount of coding experience.
I’ve done some very basic

So the tour is under way. Some numbers:

Learn About Tableau

I’m rather pleased with this interactive graph, not because it’s particularly good but because it’s my first foray into D3.js.

Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of data-based work and while there are some excellent data visualisation tools available on

Earlier this week I put together a small set of scripts to track the amount of attention the Oscar Pistorius trial was getting in Twitter. With not only local but also international audiences keen to follow the murder trial of the celebrity athlete it wasn’t

This week I spent some time working on an education project I have been dabbling with for a few weeks. Inevitably I eventually hit the PDF wall. The only place to get the extra data I needed to move the project forward was locked

This is a simple guide to creating an interactive map using Google’s Fusion Tables. I’m doing this guide because it took me absolute ages to get my head around this and once I did I realised how unbelievably simple the process is. So it’s time

Sometimes the hardest, or at least most time-consuming, part of data journalism is getting your hands on the data. This is particularly the case when you’re dealing with organisations and government departments that are not overly keen to have their data scrutinised. Take, for example, the

I’m a geek at heart. I may work in the world of media but I suspect I’m more of a geek than I ever realised. This occurred to me recently while watching an episode of Triangulation, a fantastic podcast run by Leo Laporte. In this