Finding Data

A quick post: I’m working on a self-project where I practice doing data visualization with storytelling. How do I tell a “grab you by the throat” story? When I was in college, I used to have to write each week some kind of composition in French using the topic or words assigned. The teacher teaching the class was a graduate student and sometimes I thought what she assigned was absolutely boring. Meaning, she would have to read 15 – 18 boring essays. So I wanted my writings to be something that was a touch above boring, if not something to look forward to each week.

I believe she said she looked forward to my writing each week.

And that’s what I want to do: practice writing engaging stories with data.

The stuff you have to do every week – that’s kind of hard, if not impossible to do when it’s the same kind of report each week. Besides, corporate types don’t want change. I know because I have tried a few times. Probably my most successful time was at SAIC and maybe it’s because it was a science and engineering firm and so, they were more open to this since they were a more inventive type rather than a by the book type.

But I’m going to keep trying in the hopes that one day, something fantastic will happen.

My issue right now is getting data. I don’t want to use work data because, well, it is work data and proprietary. I have a topic in mind and I’m struggling to get decent data to play with. And that issue brings to mind some stuff I have read concerning data management/data analytics.

One of the first issues that company face is figuring out what kind of data you need and where you are going to get that data. And then getting good quality data. Sometimes the company will have that data internally but sometimes they have to go buy the data. In some cases, they may have to pay for an API access to the data. So figuring what kind data you need to collect and where to get the data is a large part of the battle.

And then once you get the data or find where you can get the data, you may have to do some data clean ups – maybe do something called extract, transform, and load (ETL).

So anyway, that’s what I’m doing now. I have a topic in mind and now in search of free data that I can play around with as part of my learning.