Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything.

how to do stuff in r. two minutes or less.

I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that. To succeed, this young discipline will need to draw heavily from social science, computer science, public communications, cognitive psychology and other fields, as well as the traditional values and practices of the journalism profession.

Storing massive amounts of data in a NoSQL data store is just one side of the Big Data equation. Being able to visualize your data in such a way that you can easily gain deeper insights, is where things really start to get interesting. Lately, I've been exploring various options for visualizing (directed) graphs, including Circos. Circos is an amazing software package that visualizes your data through a circular layout. Although it's originally designed for displaying genomic data, it allows to create good-looking figures from data in any field. Just transform your data set into a tabular format and you are ready to go. The figure below illustrates the core concept behind Circos. The table's columns and rows are represented by segments around the circle. Individual cells are shown as ribbons, which connect the corresponding row and column segments. The ribbons themselves are proportional in width to the value in the cell.

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.
Every day—in an effort at “self awareness”—I have automated systems send me a few emails about the day before. But even though I’ve been accumulating data for years—and always meant to analyze it—I’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. But with Mathematica and the automated data analysis capabilities we just released in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, I thought now would be a good time to finally try taking a look—and to use myself as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics”.

Explore, Query, Visualize

Focus on the data, not the database. Induction is a new kind of tool designed for understanding and communicating relationships in data. Explore rows and columns, query to get exactly what you want, and visualize that data in powerful ways.

SQL? NoSQL? It Don't Matter

Data is just data, after all. Induction supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB out-of-the-box, and has an extensible architecture that makes it easy to write adapters for anything else you can think of. CouchDB? Oracle? Facebook Graph? Excel? Make it so!

cURL is a command-line application for performing requests using a variety of protocols including HTTP. cURL is often used by developers to test Google Data services, as it supports the HTTP functionality required to interact with the APIs at a low level.