About Data Alchemist
This is Jacob Houtman's site to stimulate the use of open data to create and share insights. Here I blog about appealing examples I discover, the results of my own projects and information on how to become a data alchemist yourself. Enjoy!
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Overview of data drive journalism: watch this video
Found this video which gives a very nice overview on the subject of data driven journalism. Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning … Continue reading
Interactive data journalism by newspapers
British newspaper the Guardian is very active in data journalism. Last month they published this “Comprehensive spending review: you make the cuts”. The coalition says it must slash billions from public spending to tackle the UK’s growing budget deficit. George … Continue reading
Big Brother is watching your telecom use.
Found this press report showing the results of research on how often “Big Brother” asks telecom providers for the details on phone calls made by individual subscribers. The graph shows the differences between European countries. This is a so called … Continue reading
Video: presentation on data visualization
Watch this TED talk on the beauty of data visualization by David McCandless. The talk was given in July 2010 at TED Global Oxford. You can find and watch more of David’s work on his site. David, thanks for to … Continue reading
Which jobs are paid by your tax?
Update: click here for complete project release. Interested in where your tax money goes? Just finished the first preview of an upcoming collection of visualizations on public paid slaries in Holland. This picture shows the public paid salaries, in case … Continue reading
Posted in Data Alchemist Projects, Data Use in the News, Government
Tagged Data Visualization, Government, Graph, Open Data, Salary
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Extract data from tables in pdf documents
The web offers many interesting documents in Adobe pdf format. Quite often the documents do contain nice tables of data. To visualize this data the way I like to, I first need to extract the data from the pdf document … Continue reading
Posted in Companies, Data Alchemist Projects, Data Alchemist Tools, Data retrieval
Tagged Data Retrieval, Data Sources, Tools
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