MIS 0855 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2.1: Fivethirtyeight, Data Journalism
23 May 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
What the Fox Knows (Silver)
• Election forecasts stood out in media; others were forecasting that Romney would win
• Foreasts ere oerrated eause the did’t represet the totalit of the jouralis at
FiveThirtyEight
• Coverage will now span five major areas: politics, economics science, life, and sports
• Team has broad set of skills – statistical analysis, data visualization, computer programming,
data-literate reporting
• The fo kos a thigs, ut the hedgehog kos oe ig thig
• Conventional news organizations are lacking in data journalism skills; might be because
graduates that excel in writing and reading do not excel in math
• First attempt in finding approaches: two-dimensional chart that posits a distinction between
quantitative vs qualitative, and rigorous vs anecdotal
o Problem: aversion to anecdotal evidence – analysis too dismissive of important
jouralists’ role
• “oe jouralists too us lookig at the data o paper istead of hat’s i frot of the
• The plural of anecdote is data
• Process to transform anecdote into data broken down into four steps:
o Collection: interviews, documentary research, first-person observation
o Organization: run descriptive stats on it, place it into a relational database or build a
data visualization from it
o Explanation: going beyond the who, what where, and when to questions of why and
how
▪ Prole: otio of ojetiit, here it’s ofte soous ith eutralit
o Generalization: fundamental concern of science, achieved by verifying hypotheses
through predictions or repeated experiments
• Advantage of data journalism – generalizes better than traditional approaches (could just be a
guess)
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