Der Herbst im Parlament

26 October 2010

Mapping-Projekt des Abends: mit welchen Themen hat sich der Bundestag in den vergangenen Monaten beschäftigt? Auf der Basis des parlamentarischen Dokumentenservers, eines kleinen Scripts und theJit hier die visuelle Agenda des bisherigen Spätsommers/Herbsts: Im Prinzip kann man vier große Debatten ausmachen: Hartz 4, Atomkraft, Stuttgart 21 und die Gesundheitspolitik. Die Grafik gibt es auch in Interakt, allerdings basiert sie auf einem fetten Datenbrocken, den ich niemandem in den Browser laden will. Einen Datenbank-Dump der Themencluster gibts natürlich gern. Die Visualisierung basiert zwar nicht auf compuccino-Code, allerdings durfte ich dort im Juli viel Erfahrung mit dem DIP-System (aus dem die Daten stammen) sammeln. Danke.

Other blog posts

  • A little tour of aleph, a data search tool for reporters

    Over the past six months, I've been working for OCCRP to productise Aleph, a powerful search tool for investigative reporters. This is a little tour of it's key features, and a little view into the future development agenda.

  • A Poor Journalists's Text Mining Toolkit

    How can journalists search and analyze collections of documents on their own computers with simple tools? At last weekend's DataHarvest, we ran a workshop trying to answer that question. This write-up to covers using Apache Tika for content extraction and regular expressions in Sublime Text as an advanced search tool.

  • Against Decentralization

    In the free software/open web community, the notion that the web should be decentralized is more than a shared ideal, it is a piece of dogma. But are we really promoting a progressive vision of the web, or fighting a losing battle to avoid political engagement?

  • Keeping stock: investigative data warehouses

    Data warehouses are used in industry to manage the many datasets accrued inside a company that might be relevant to reporting and analysis. I want to propose a similar pattern for investigative journalism.

  • SpenDB, a data analysis tool for government finance, looking for testers!

    The first beta version of SpenDB features a small set of well-designed features for data import and analysis. Now the platform is ready to be adopted by anyone interested in exploring financial data, from budgets to procurement.

  • On Hacks/Hackers, Google and community building

    A few weeks ago, the US team of Hacks/Hackers announced their plans to turn the network of journalism innovators into a collaboration with Google News Labs, starting with an event in Berlin. I tweeted about this, and Phillip Smith wrote a thoughtful reaction. Given this invitation to debate, I wanted to outline my criticism in more detail.

  • SpenDB, a light-weight tool for government financial data

    Over the past few months, I have spent my weekends simplifying and modernizing the OpenSpending codebase to create SpenDB - a prototype-stage, light-weight data loading tool and analytical API for government financial data.

  • Who’s got dirt? - What if robots could do cross-border investigations?

    If we want to make open data relevant to investigative journalism, we have to simplify the way people access it. We must create a way for our data tools to talk to each other and trade information about the companies and people we are researching.