Reading one
Barr, Caelainn. Building Your Own Data Set: Documenting Knife Crime in the United Kingdom. In Bounegru, Liliana & Gray, Jonathan (eds.). The data journalism handbook: towards a critical data practice. Amsterdam University Press, 2021, p. 49-54
Read the text and answer the questions below | Answers at the end of the page
Question 1
For the period studied, outside London how many of the victims were Black?
- 5%
- 20%
- Less than 20%
- More than 20%
Question 2
The data in the Home Office’s Homicide Index is gathered for which area?
- UK
- England and Wales
- England
- Scotland
- Wales
Question 3
How many techniques does the writer suggest as ways to gather your own data as a journalist? What are they?
Question 4
How did they collect data for the most recent year, i.e. a period for which no centrally collected data was yet available?
Answers
1 Less than 20% (one in five)
“The data showed in England and Wales in the 10 years to 2015, one third of the victims were Black. However, outside the capital, stabbing deaths among young people were not mostly among Black boys, as in the same period less than one in five victims outside London were Black” (p. 53)
2
England and Wales
“The data I needed was held by the Home Office in a data set called the Homicide Index. The figures were reported to the Home Office by police forces in England and Wales” (p. 53)
3
(Around) six
“This may be done manually through data entry into a spreadsheet, transforming information locked in PDFs into structured data you can analyze, procuring documents through a human source or the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), programming to scrape data from documents or web pages or automating data capture through an application programming interface (API)” (p. 51)
4
Social media, police reports, newspapers
“As there was no public or centrally collated data we decided to keep track of the information ourselves, through police reports, news clippings, Google Alerts, Facebook and Twitter” (p. 53)