Andrew Flowers: "The Six Types of Data Journalism Stories"

Data journalists write stories with data and find stories in data. At FiveThirtyEight, data journalists' preferred tools are R and the tidyverse packages. R is used to find stories through exploratory analysis, web scraping, and statistics; then, to tell stories, we leverage R’s powerful chart and interactive packages (like ggplot2). This talk will profile the six types of data journalism stories, motivated by novelty, outlier, archetype, trend, debunking, and forecast. As examples, several FiveThirtyEight stories or projects that used R extensively will be profiled, covering topics such as p-hacking in nutrition studies, the history of police officer shootings, how Uber is affecting New York City taxis, and what local characteristics explained Donald Trump winning the Presidency.

Andrew Flowers is a journalist and data scientist. He was previously the quantitative editor and economics writer for FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver's data-driven news website. Before that, he was an economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He graduated with a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago. He is passionate about R, open source software, politics, and basketball.

Reed College is an institution of higher education in the liberal arts devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity. Its undergraduate program of study, leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, is demanding and intense and balances breadth of knowledge across the curriculum with depth of knowledge in a particular field of study. The goal of the Reed education is that students learn and demonstrate rigor and independence in their habits of thought, inquiry, and expression.