Data-driven journalism has driven some of my recent posts. I blogged about turning anecdote into data and how being data-driven means being question-driven. The latter noted the similarity between interviewing people and interviewing data. In this post I want to examine interviewing people about data, especially the data used by people to drive
At the Journalism Interactive 2014 conference, Derek Willis spoke about interviewing data, his advice for becoming a data-driven journalist. “The bulk of the skills involved in interviewing people and interviewing data are actually pretty similar,” Willis explained. “We want to get to know it a little bit. We want to figure
In my previous post, I discussed sampling error (i.e., when a randomly chosen sample doesn’t reflect the underlying population, aka margin of error) and sampling bias (i.e., when the sample isn’t randomly chosen at all), both of which big data advocates often claim can, and should, be overcome by using all the data. In this
