Wordblog

Until today I had not noticed that the Guardian put on the web a month ago mapped data from the earlier, and limited, release of information about MPs expenses.

Charles Arthur in the Technology section today alerts us to the item he put on the Datablog on April 3. And his suggestion that there should be an immediate XML feed of of approved MPs expenses is not far-fetched — David Cameron suggested it in the Commons yesterday, if Simon Hoggart was not joking.

The power of mapping as a tool for journalists has been woefully under-used in this country, in part because of the difficulty in obtaining data. Not that it is always easy in the US as this report from the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press shows

The map in the Guardian has been produced with the help of Tony Hirst of the Open University, who tells us more in the OUseful.Info blog.

Data on these maps relates to travel expenses in 2007-8. It quickly showed me John Gummer was the cheapest Suffolk MP by a large margin with a total travel expenses claim of £1,361. So I am a little sorry that yesterday I poked fun at his £100 for mole clearance.

On the travel front the next lowest charging Suffolk MP was Chris Mole of Ipswich with £4,343 — more than three times that of Gummer in the neighbouring Suffolk Coastal constituency. The biggest claim by a Suffolk MP was £7,734 by David Ruffley at Bury St Edmunds.

Mapping makes it much easier to find and compare data from a huge file. But its real power comes when one set of data is overlaid on another. For example if a pig farm was thought to be responsible for polluting a watercourse, a reporter might overlay a map showing pig farms with another of watercourse pollution incidents.

This would immediately show if there was a correlation. If there was it would be a much bigger story.

If I remember rightly this kind of technique was used by the Miami Herald in winning its 1999 Pulitzer prize for exposing voter fraud in a mayoral election.

Mapping has become on of the most powerful tools for investigative reporters in the US. In the UK it is much harder to obtain databases but there is also a lack of skill in using the techniques.

In the Guardian’s new maps, it has depended on skills at the Open University. With the financial problems of newspapers it is difficult to see where the money, or will, for this training will come from.

This is one area in which university journalism departments could take the lead, provided the media is supportive: students want to know that what they are learning will help them get a job.