Where to Live in Barcelona in a Dashboard

Sometimes data can tell a story much faster and effectively than many words. That's why I´ve decided to start sharing more data stories via this blog, hoping to both:

1. address specific topics readers want to dive in (often these will not be data-people, they would be new to my blog, probably coming after googling a specific questions e.g. "which are the best boroughs to live in Barcelona?").
2. showcase data visualization tools and best practices to present your data (these are data-people, yes you my regular readers, you might like to see a tool in action).

Playing with R, Shiny Dashboard and Google Analytics Data

In this post, I want to share some examples of data visualization I was playing with recently. Like in many other occasions, my field of application is digital analytics data. Precisely, data from Google Analytics.

You might remember a previous post where I built a tentative dashboard using R, Shiny and Google Charts. The final result was not too bad, however the layout was somewhat too rigid since I was using the command "merge" to merge the charts and create the final dashboard.

So, I thought to spend some time improving my previous dashboard and include a couple of new visualizations, which will be hopefully inspiring. Of course, I am still using R, Shiny, and in particular shinydashboard: an ad hoc package to build dashboard with R.

All Data Journalism Graduates in a Map

This week I got my certificate of completion from the course "Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools"(if you like to know more about data journalism check out my post "3 Great Examples of Data Journalism Stories"). I enjoyed the course a lot, and I am proud of being one of the 1250 people who successfully completed the course. I was a bit surprised we were only 1250 graduates!

3 Great Examples of Data Journalism Stories

Over the last month I've been spending part of my free time learning about an emerging discipline in the areas of data analytics: Data Journalism. I am doing it, firstly because I find the combination "data analysis + journalism" very fascinating, but also because, as a Web Analyst I believe that there are some very important skills I can absorb from Data Journalists (here is a post where I talk about Web Analyst skills).

The aim of this post is to introduce you to this emerging discipline, and show you a couple of practical examples of data journalism. To do so, I've selected 3 published data journalism stories and analysed each of them by answering four key questions:

1. What does the story do?
2. How was it created (methodology)? 
3. How was it illustrated?
4. What technologies were used to create and present the story to readers?   

Telling a Story with Data at all costs

Today Facebook got 10 years old. Oh yes, I´ve seen so many people today sharing the news on social networks, twitter, G+, linkedin, and obviously facebook itself.

So why not telling the same news with some data?

I am a bit in a hurry, then I will go straight to the point: Happy birthday facebook!