1. Social Networks and Data Journalism Chapter 10 Mantie Reid
Pace University
Social Networks and Data Journalism
Chapter 10
Mantie Reid
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line

2. Social Networks Analysis at Morning Analytics
The emergence of online social networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ creates a rich source of data which opens many research problems both from social science and quantitative/technical viewpoint
Kelly wants to understand how people come together and when they do, what their impact is on politics and public policy. Sees math, statistics, computer science (Including machine learning) as tools he needs to use
Data Journalism: Constructing stories that can be told from social networking data
Expertise lies in visualization combined with drawing conclusions from those visualizations
C. O’Neil, R. Schutt, “ Doing Data Science – Straight Talk From The Frontline”, 2013 O’Reilly Media Inc., PP
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line

3. Case-Attribute Data versus Social Network Data
Case-attribute refers to how you normally see people feed models with various “cases,” which can refer to people or events – each of which have various “attributes,” which can refer to age, or operating systems, or search histories.
Why network analysis is sometimes superior to case attribute data analysis; ex: The federal government spent money to poll people in Afghanistan. The idea was to see what citizens want in order to anticipate what’s going to happen in the future.
Kelly: What will happen isn’t a simple function of what individuals think; instead, it’s a question of who has the power and what they think
C. O’Neil, R. Schutt, “ Doing Data Science – Straight Talk From The Frontline”, O’Reilly Media Inc., PP
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line

4. Case-Attribute Data versus Social Network Data
Imagine going back in time, conducting a scientific poll of the citizenry of Europe in 1750 to determine the future of politics
If you knew what you were doing , you’d be looking at who was marrying whom among the royalty
Kelly claims that the world is a network much like it’s a bunch of cases with attributes. If you only understand how individual behave, how do you tie things together
C. O’Neil, R. Schutt, “ Doing Data Science – Straight Talk From The Frontline”, O’Reilly Media Inc., PP
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line

5. Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line
Thought Experiment
Predict the future political situation of Egypt. What kinds of political parties will there be? What is the country of Egypt going to look like in 5, 10, or 20 years?
You have access to exactly two of the following datasets for all Egyptians: the Facebook or Twitter network, a complete record of who went to school with who, the text or phone records of everyone, everyone’s addresses, or the network data on members of all formal political organizations and private companies.
Consider changing the standard direction of your thinking
What can we learn from this or that data source?
What would it mean to predict politics in a society? What kind of data would you need to do that? Figure out the questions first and then look for data to help answer them.
C. O’Neil, R. Schutt, “ Doing Data Science – Straight Talk From The Frontline”, 2013 O’Reilly Media Inc., PP
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line

6. Morningside Analytics
Example of the Arabic blogosphere
11/8/2018

7. Morningside Analytics
11/8/2018
English Language Blogs

8. Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line
Data Journalism
Practice of Data Journalism is divided into various fields:
Graphics Vs interactive Feature
Research
Database engineers
Crawlers
Software Developers
Domain Expert Writers
C. O’Neil, R. Schutt, “ Doing Data Science – Straight Talk From The Frontline”, 2013 O’Reilly Media Inc., PP. 270
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line

9. Writing Technical Journalism: Advice from an Expert
Data Journalism involved lots of Data visualization; it is a fast way of describing the bottom line of a dataset
Statistics inspired you to write things about the world
E.g., the average person on Twitter is a woman with 250 followers, but the median person has 0 followers – the data is clearly skewed; that’s an inspiration right there for a story!
The fundamental skill is translation: taking complicated stories and deriving meaning that readers will understand
They also needs to anticipate questions and turn them into quantitative experiments and answer them persuasively
Don’t have a strong thesis before you interview the experts
Go in with a loose idea of what you are searching for and be willing to change your mind and pivot if the experts lead you in a new and interesting direction
C. O’Neil, R. Schutt, “ Doing Data Science – Straight Talk From The Frontline”, 2013 O’Reilly Media Inc., PP
11/8/2018
Doing Data Science - Stright Talk from the Front Line