Week 5: April 17- April 23,2016
This was my week of realizations. I think I am finally feeling like I am settled in Berlin and understanding my role in my newsroom. I’ve had a lot of realizations about my work, myself and my fellowship.
When I first got here, I felt like I was excited and free and eager, but also just floating around in my newsroom and in Berlin because the fellowship allows for so much flexibility. This is the first time in my life where I haven’t had a structure, so it’s been a bit weird for me to decide what exactly I want. With this in mind, I thought of some concrete ways to help me feel like I have a little bit of a structure and a routine.
Here’s what I came up with:
- Friday is my personal project day (work on learning something new, file my expenses, work on conference talks & pitches, and work on personal projects)
- Having this blog (although admittedly, I wrote many posts and hoarded them till now) serve as a place where I can write about my thoughts, learnings and share my experiences with the community on a weekly basis or more
- Focusing on Pandas and learning more advanced bash scripting so I can analyze my data
- Open source more projects that I work on and write more about how I clean and interpret data
- Look through German data sets & do a quick analysis of the data and write about it in a weekly or biweekly blog
- Host a workshop or some guide for the newsroom in the next month
This came about because I chatted with Daniel, who graciously spent some of his time this week and last week helping me think through my goals and how I can share my knowledge as well as grow during these next 10 months. Something I noticed in the newsroom was that many people have understanding of data, but there are so many more ways they can be looking at their data sets if they knew the basics of how to begin using data in stories. I’ve decided I will host a newsroom session and maybe a workshop at a meetup on how you can get started with using data in stories and how you can set up your own datasets and format them in a way that is easy for others to look at and work with.
Other realizations and things I learned this week:
- Whether I like it or not, it’s always going to take me a little bit longer than another reporter in the newsroom to look at a data set because of the context that I lack and language barrier. Last week, it was pretty frustrating for me when I tried to understand the nursing home data without any help. I realize that I can’t get mad because it’s not something in my control and I really should schedule a pre-data meeting with someone in the newsroom that can explain the data to me. But this isn’t just a thing that I have to do because I’m dealing with German data, but is something that people do more often when dealing with data in general. In the U.S., if I had a question about a dataset, I would either call the person who created the datafile and sent it to me, talk to someone knowledgable in that field or speak to the reporter who received the data about things that they know about the data and things that they don’t know about the data, but would like to find out. It’s good to get clarification about the limitations of the dataset upfront and understand what the dataset includes. Essentially, the key is really understanding the background of the data and understanding what we know and don’t know about the data before diving into any analysis.
- I already knew this about myself, but I tend to go down rabbit-holes of Google searching when I am learning something new. It’s great because I end up learning a lot about a certain topic I’m researching, but sometimes it doesn’t prove to be productive because I end up spending a lot of time reading about things that may not necessarily be relevant to what I need to know in that moment. Now, I’m trying to be conscious about how much time I spend searching something, especially if it’s a German term. I just have to speak up and ask someone in the newsroom who is more knowledgeable and can explain it way faster.
- I now changed all my preferences so I always encode in UTF-8. And I’m getting better at typing umlauts.
- I learned this word: “Völkerverständigung” which means “cultural understanding” – something I’m doing a lot of here in Berlin.
- Related to that: I talk really fast in English and I am more conscious of this now that I am in a place where English is spoken, but is not spoken as quickly. I also am more conscious of big words that I use and not assuming that people know the word I’m saying. I also am trying harder to not say so many colloquial phrases or slang terms and if I do, explain them to others so they don’t feel bad if they don’t understand or ask what that is.
- I get a lot done here in the morning because of the time difference and I really love it. Since most of my friends and family are sleeping during my morning hours here, I am free to concentrate on the things that I am working on or researching in with zero distractions.
- Making friends as an adult is hard and also weird. My weirdest experience (which was definitely not an attempt to make friends, but to just small-talk with someone, which again is not a thing Germans do) was at the laundromat a week ago. I asked someone where he is from and he responded, “I have a girlfriend.” So… that was the end of our conversation and also super weird. My colleagues invited me to a party with lots of data-vis & data people on Friday, so that was a good place to meet people.
- I also began my personal project of learning about on-boarding and off-boarding processes in newsrooms. If you’d like to contribute, fill out this form!
One more German word I learned this week was “Wollmichsau” which means “egg-laying wool-milk-s0w” or in other words, a jack-of-all-trades.
This can be seen as illustrated on this mug found in my newsroom:
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