Triweekly[13.3.11-13.3.31]

2013-03-30

他是世界上最好的男人，他虽然没钱给我买游艇，请我吃法餐，但是他可以每天早上跑好几条街去给我买我最爱吃的豆浆油条。 > > ——北京遇上西雅图（纽约警察局·“爱情口供”） > >

[Data Journalism & Web Scraping]

I’ve already finished reading [](http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/), whose contents are inspiring for me as a data fans. I like programming and telling stories. Telling stories with data and its visualization would be cool as well as clear.  When information was scarce, most of our efforts were devoted to hunting and gathering. Now that information is abundant, processing is more important. As the definition wrote by Philip Meyer, What Data journalists do is at two levels:1) analysis to bring sense and structure out of the never-ending flow of data and 2) presentation to get what's important and relevant into the consumer's head. Like science, data journalism discloses its methods and presents its findings in a way that can be verified by replication.

Data journalism serves two important purposes for news organizations: finding unique stories(not from news wires), and executing the watchdog function.

I am totally agree with that. Firstly, We data journalists can dig deeply in data and find latent factors in an automatic way, which might more convincing than traditional journalism. Secondly, Data journalists often build news apps to trace the movements of the target event which is energy-saving and getting stronger over time. Whereas, it’s not a replacement of traditional journalism, but an addition to it.

While reading the book, I am practicing and learning to analysis. I building a tag-network of Arab Spring using the tweets from Twitter search API[1]. After the instruction of Dr. Hui Xiong, I am learning scraping data from Uspto whose website is structured in java script form. I learned windmill[2][3] and Selenium[4],tools used for web testing automation that can be used to solve the JavaScript execution problem.

In addition, I gathered 4 partners with me, to apply for a ginko-yellow fund project in my school. Our project named Visualization of a target event based on Social Media. Wish we succeed in this application!

[Birthday & Panda park]

March 25th is my 22’s birthday. To enjoy the special day to come, I together with my roommates went to Chengdu Panda Base[5] on March 24th, and having a great time there.

[Finding Mr.Right]

March 28th, after a tired working night, I was frustrated and eager to watch the movie Finding Mr.Right which is crazily praised in both Renren and Sina Weibo.  So I went to the cinema and enjoy a happy afternoon, brimming in a Romantic and sincere love story.

The most moving part in my view, is the scene when Jiajia and Frank were tried in the police office, the unbelievable consistency of their testimony celebrated by their release and the upcoming dramatic night stay in New York.

Well, I would like to watch it again if the change were offered me.(Quoted from Russell)

References

[1]用Twitter挖掘“阿拉伯之春”之革命因果

[2]Web scraping with Python (Part 2)

[3]Windmill Testing Framework

[4]Selenium 2.0 documentation

[5]成都熊猫基地