What were the most popular years for countries to join the UN?

Photo credit: Randal Droher, Flickr

After learning how to build a basic html scraper in Google Drive a couple of weeks ago on a data journalism intensive day, I thought I’d give it a try outside the classroom.

193 countries are member states of the United Nations today but when it was first formed in 1945, there were only 51 member states (49 of the original ones remain).

Since then the organisation has grown substantially, but I wanted to take a closer look at the years countries joined – were there any spikes in membership?

The future of Digital Journalism

Photo: Sascha Poflepp

The number one question (well, after the age old ‘are papers dead yet?’) at York Alumni Association’s Digital Journalism Debate last Wednesday was: How do you remain responsive to your users as the number of devices people consume news on increases?

Who is the “Interhactives” user?

The website Interhactives is due to be re-launched next week by my MA Interactive Journalism coursemates and I, but before we go live, last week our Social Media and Community Engagement tutor Ben Whitelaw asked us to consider ‘who is OUR typical user?”  Ultimately, who are we going to be targeting our content towards?

My first MozFest

A week ago I attended my first MozFest conference at the Ravensbourne Centre in London.  I picked up loads of useful skills relating to data journalism, privacy, and social media, but also came away with bigger questions.

For those who don’t know, the Mozilla Festival is an annual festival based in London where programmers, inventors, journalists, and general tech luvvies come from around the world to learn how to innovate and champion a user-built web.