The Curious Journalist's Guide to Data

And if you do understand data, you will begin to see stories that others literally cannot imagine. We need those stories told. That is, perhaps, the best possible argument for learning more.

relation between words and numbers is of fundamental importance to the pursuit of truth.

historian G. Kitson Clark’s advice for making generalizations:

Do not guess; try to count. And if you cannot count, admit that you are guessing.9

Quantitative thinking starts with recognizing when you are talking about quantities.

Sometimes this is not a simple thing to do. It seems clear enough how to quantify the number of cars sold or the amount of grain exported, where counting has the feel of something objective and definite. But journalists are interested in many other things where the proper relationship between the words, the numbers, and the world is much less clear

Quantification is the process that creates data. You can only measure what you can conceive

The mathematical modeling tools we employ at once extend and limit our ability to conceive the world. - David Hestenes6

Every authoritarian planner dreams of utopia, but totalitarian technocratic visions have been uniformly disastrous for the people living in them

Journalism depends on what we have decided to count, the techniques used to interpret those counts, how we decide to show the results, and what happens after we do. And then the world changes, and we report again

essential for journalism that asks what will happen, what should be done, or how best to do it