In News We Must Trust ... Data

The crisis in data gathering and privacy is here but like using your mind to figure a puzzle it can be useful too.

Feb. 4, 2012 , New York, NY,Columbia School of Journalism , At an open program called "liberate the data", The Columbia School of Journalism opened its doors to journalists and data geeks. The Journalism Data Derby was held in one of the lecture halls.approximately 50 people attended.The video on our blog today shows one of the presentations from the crime group. There were 6-7 groups formed that took tasks on in Science, finance, crime, etc., Nujobi attended to observe and learn about the power of data collection and the newest trends in reporting from that data.

Since much of Law enforcement has historically relied on the investigative research of journlalists in the past and the fact that there is data on pretty much on everyone, since FaceBook google,linkedin ,and other social media engines collect every key stroke and track your every move on the internet. We thought we better get the story before the story gets us.

The process we observed while at Columbia was scraping, (taking data from html that was published on the internet), taking scanned physical documents and scanning them in and scraping data from those documents. Many merges of different forms of data were categorized and organized into what each team felt was a logical format. Interestingly data joined together could ever be complete particularly from event driven cases. It certainly seems that journalism has moved more towards legal procedure and presentation....

Data can reveal so much and is important in News, in a court of law, . Lets take a look at some typical data you can mine for information about crime.