Interactive vehicle recall data

By Leslie Young

I recently put together an interactive feature that lets users explore vehicle recall data and compare recalls on different cars. The full news story is here, with a nice TV report by Global Toronto’s Sean O’Shea.

The data for this is drawn from Transport Canada’s Road Safety Recalls Database, a searchable version of which is available on their website, although I had to do an Access to Information request to get the underlying data.

What excited me about this project is that it’s truly interactive. What you see on the screen completely changes depending on what you type. Everyone will have a different experience because everyone will want to search and compare different vehicles. Hopefully, it’s both informative and fun.

I used Tableau Public to power this feature. I’m liking this tool a lot lately because of the way you can link a variety of different visualizations together to really explore a given topic.

You do this by creating filters and applying them to multiple charts - in this case, I created some “Quick filters” and set them to “Global.”

It’s not perfect though. Tableau is powerful, but very non-intuitive to use. This project took a lot of trial and error and email exchanges with Tableau staff to put together. The Public free version also has a limit of 100,000 rows, which meant that I had to summarize my data and make it show only recalls from 1990 and later.

Still, pretty fun. Last week, I also did a similar visualization (under the hood at least) on MP’s expenses.

Freedom of Information and the PDF

By Leslie Young

PDFs are a fact of life in data journalism. Most of the time, when you request “an electronic file” or “an electronic document” in your Freedom of Information request, the end result is a PDF.

While it’s a step up from simply getting a stack of papers as your response, a PDF response is annoying in a number of ways. It’s hard to work with. Unlike a spreadsheet format, (Excel, .CSV, etc.) you can’t analyze a PDF. You often can’t copy and paste or export the data – sometimes Acrobat won’t even recognize the document as text!

Some departments do respond with an Excel file. Some are even nice enough, when I ask, to email me the Excel version of the PDF response that they had previously sent me. They don’t have to do this, and I really appreciate it.

But it seems like the default electronic file format is the PDF, which means that I will spend hours trying to force the information into a friendlier format. It doesn’t stop me from doing the story, it just makes it more difficult.

So why do many departments seem to favour the PDF? I decided to ask the Treasury Board Secretariat, the body charged with administering the federal government’s Access to Information legislation.

Here’s what they said.

Question:

I would like to know why, when a requester requests an electronic document, the response is usually provided as a PDF.

Why do departments seem to prefer releasing information as PDFs instead of a more open electronic file format, such as an Excel spreadsheet? This is particularly relevant in the case of a request for information from a database, which since it’s a table filled with numbers, would be more useful to a journalist in an Excel or other format.

Answer:

Our government is committed to openness and transparency which is why we are pursuing the Open Government initiative that will continue to make government data freely available, and currently requires all completed ATI summaries to be posted online within 30 calendar days of being readied.  Current Access to Information regulations direct departments to provide information in the format requested wherever possible, and our government continues to update and add to the already hundreds of thousands of data sets and the amount of information available to Canadians online in various formats.  Where alternative formats are not available or suitable, the government will respond with a pdf version in order to ensure that requests for information are still carried out effectively.

So it seems all you need to do is ask – very specifically. It’s a valuable lesson. Next time, I will make sure to ask for a .CSV, and see what happens.

Introducing the Data Desk

By Leslie Young

Welcome to the Data Desk blog, home of Global News’ Specials and Interactives team.

You’ll find posts here by Global News online journalists Patrick Cain, Leslie Young, Keith Robinson and others on occasion. We write about the craft of data journalism, Freedom of Information, and the technical side of online reporting tools.

In our daily jobs, we put together maps, visualizations and experiment with other fun ways to tell a story online. You can explore our collected work on the GlobalNews.ca site.  

Most of the information we use to create our interactive features comes through Freedom of Information requests. We’ve sent out around 150 requests to over 50 government agencies in the past year. So you’ll find the occasional post about that here too.

Keep checking back for a behind-the-scenes look at how we do our data journalism. And of course, feel free to follow and contact us on Twitter: @globaldatadesk