Data Journalism Top 10: Election Forecasts, The Sweatpants Era, Hong Kong Protests, DJ in Eastern Europe & Caucasus

One of the biggest issues that comes with visualizing election forecasts is how to incorporate uncertainty in a way that is understandable to readers. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 10 to 16 finds FiveThirtyEight explaining their election forecast design process and considerations. Elsewhere, The New York Times Magazine has been digging into the collapse of the fashion industry, and the Hong Kong Free Press is teaming up with the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong to expand its protest research archive.

Collaborating to Identify COVID-19’s Victims in New York City

When a team of student journalists realized that thousands of New Yorkers had died due to COVID-19 but had been left out of the obituary pages, they teamed up to create Missing Them, an ambitious collaborative journalism project working to memorialize everyone that died due to COVID-19 in one of the hardest-hit cities in America.

Data Journalism Top 10: Herd Immunity Calculator, Post-COVID Offices, Back-to-School Jitters

How many people need to get infected or die of the coronavirus before we reach a herd immunity threshold? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 3 to 9 finds that The Washington Post created a herd immunity calculator to estimate this. Also in the Data Journalism Top 10 this week: BBC’s Visual and Data Journalism team illustrates the future of work environments post-COVID-19, The New York Times shares projections of the potential number of children who may carry the virus back to school in the fall according to county, and Oregon Public Broadcasting discovers a surprising reason for the low incidence of coronavirus transmission in bars and restaurants in the US state of Oregon. 

Why Reporters Need to Carefully Assess the Evidence on COVID-19

Reporters investigating the coronavirus pandemic are confronted with a mountain of medical research papers, statistical models, and government figures that purport to be true. But experts insist that even investigative journalists without health backgrounds can readily assess their truthfulness and relevance, if they follow the right principles and tools.