Author Archives: jwyg

The Intellectual History of Europe

In the introduction to their 1984 volume on Philosophy in History, Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner describe their vision of a comprehensive (and incidentally impossible) “Intellectual History of Europe”: Imagine a thousand-volume work entitled The Intellectual History of Europe. Imagine also a great convocation of resurrected thinkers, at which every person mentioned in [...]

Posted in history, intellectualhistory, philosophy | Leave a comment

Data Journalism Handbook released at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia

The Data Journalism Handbook – a free, open-source book that aims to help journalists to use data to improve the news – has been released today at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. The book is an international, collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates and best practitioners – including from Australian Broadcasting [...]

Posted in data, datajournalism, datajournalismhandbook, projects | 1 Comment

Communicating Climate Change

Today the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC), an independent charity “integrating research on climate change, energy and economics”, released a set of Climate Factsheets to help to communicate climate science research to a broader public: Climate change research encompasses tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies, decades of observations and the work of thousands of scientists. [...]

Posted in advocacy, climatechange, data, energy, environment, open data, policy | Leave a comment

Curating the Commons with TEXTUS

There are hundreds of public domain works scattered all over the internet – from well known projects like the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons projects, to national and international portals like Europeana and the nascent Digital Public Library of America. And of course there are numerous small islands [...]

Posted in bibliography, digitalhumanities, open data, openknowledge, textus | 5 Comments

Illustrations for the Data Journalism Handbook

Here is a preview of some illustrations for the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, open source reference book which shows how journalists can use data to improve the news. They were created by the talented Kate Hudson, based on the original designs she did for the book at MozFest 2011. If you want to be [...]

Posted in data, datajournalism, datajournalismhandbook, design, open data, projects | 3 Comments

Postcards for the Public Domain Review

I’ve just printed a new batch of postcards for the Public Domain Review, a free web-based review for works which have entered the public domain. I’m going to be leaving some at different spots in the Bay Area, while I’m visiting. If you have cunning ideas for where we should distribute them, or if you’d [...]

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Poster about the Data Journalism Handbook for the Information Design Conference 2012

Freelance infographic designer Lulu Pinney has kindly designed a wonderful poster which illustrates some of the topics covered in the Data Journalism Handbook, a free, open source reference book which shows how journalists can use data to improve the news. She uses a process diagram to represent different aspects of the data journalist’s workflow – [...]

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On Machine Readable Reading Lists

A few years ago I used to work at several college and departmental libraries at the University of Cambridge. One of the tasks which library staff regularly had to undertake was to cross reference the latest copies of all relevant reading lists with their collections, to ensure that they had copies of all the books [...]

Posted in digital, digitalhumanities, humanities, ideas, open data, openknowledge, openphilosophy, projects, technology, textus | Leave a comment

Europe’s Energy wins a Silver Award at Malofiej 20

Europe’s Energy, a project I helped to create to put EU energy targets into context, has just won a Silver Award at Malofiej 20. The Malofiej Awards recognise innovative infographics from around the world: The Malofiej Awards have since 1993 given recognition to the best infographics published in print and on-line across the globe. Every [...]

Posted in data, datajournalism, energy, environment, europe, open data, policy, projects, visualisation | 1 Comment

The Sea of Stories

Earlier this week the Guardian, Forbes and others covered the discovery of 500 fairy tales collected by 19th century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. I sent a note about this to Professor Jack Zipes, who promptly replied urging caution about the discovery and pointing to many other (in his view more interesting) 19th century collections [...]

Posted in bibliography, culture, fairytales, hamann, herder, history, humanities, intellectualhistory, literature | 2 Comments