View source for OpenNews/hackdays/storyandalgorithm/jAngels

'''Project name: jAngels: Visualizing Journalism Angel Funding'''

'''Your team:''' Lisa Williams, Erika Owens

'''Project URL(s), if applicable:'''  None yet
'''Hashtag, if #relevant:''' #storyhack

'''What is it?''' jAngels will take funding data for nonprofit news tools (and perhaps sites) and provide a timeline to show trends in what gets funded.  

'''Who is it for:''' Eric Newton.  Corey Ford.  Okay, and maybe my mom.  

'''Your goal for this weekend:''' I'd like to load the data into a timeline and see what happens.  

'''Your starting point:'''  I'm using data I collected myself along with data from J-Lab on journalism funding, and visualizing that with [http://propublica.github.com/timeline-setter/ Timeline Setter], a Ruby-based timeline generation tool originally created by the ProPublica data team. 

'''Current Progress''' 

Hey!  I actually managed to stuff the data into a timeline.  What I discovered, though, is that it's probably the wrong tool for the job; TimelineSetter does poorly when you have a lot of data points at the same point in time (the individual funding events are just denoted by year: 2008, 2009, etc).  I'm currently thinking of trying out the same data using an animated bubble chart, using [http://d3js.org/ D3.js], which has been used for the same purpose by the NYT, for example.  

I will be writing about the process of getting Timeline Setter working.  

Previously:  I've managed to get Timeline Setter up and running.  I wrote about the process at my learn-to-code for journalists blog, [http://lifeandcode.tumblr.com Life and Code]: [http://lifeandcode.tumblr.com/post/25257880167/i-am-at-the-story-algorithm-hack-day-held-at Yak Shaving, Magical Incantations, and Data Journalism].

*<b>How is this project useful?</b> It's useful to funders because it gives them the ability to see if what they're funding actually matches with their own gut feeling about what they should be funding; it helps people who would like to get funded figure out where they should focus their energy if they want to try for nonprofit funding.  

*<b>Where is this project going and what lessons/concepts can be applied to other projects?</b> My main motivation for doing this project was actually to gain technical skills.  I wanted to be able to get a Ruby environment up and working, and be able to use some previously written pieces of code to interact with datasets I had lying around that I thought were interesting but would be more accessible in a visual format.   In general, I don't think that a project being perpetual in nature makes it a better project.  All pieces of music end; all movies end; if they didn't, they'd be unbearable.