How to download many documents from an url, all at the same time. Well, we will focus on url patterns and a Firefox plug in to do so. Let’s take a look with a practical example about the recent election data.
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Now that elections are done and dusted, and results are pouring in, I wanted to take a step back and look at previous councillor performance, because how can we say our new councillors are doing a good job if we have nothing to compare them to? Just before the 2016 local government elections, I decided to take a look at the meeting attendance records of the City of Cape Town councillors. The Council, and its sub-councils, meet monthly, with the exception of December, according to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). I found that 70% of councillors have missed at...
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Too many files, too big, lots of data? Chaos. Finding trends over time usually means we need to combine different datasets from different years: files that are not designed for this purpose and are usually very big. We need to clean the data as fast as possible and do this perfectly accurately, but how? When the files are this big, copying, pasting and manually filtering the data we want is not the way to go, and this can also lead to accidental errors. So, I recently came across an incredibly useful tool for journalism (read: Code for South Africa...
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STORYTELLING CHALLENGE: What’s your story?
Why should journalists care about url patterns?
What’s data got to do with it? We’re accepting applications for our third Data-Driven Journalism Academy. Apply, and find out…