Chilean Chronicles, Part XX: Zorba the Greek and My Data Journalism Class

I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek when I was a sophomore in college, and many of the book’s moments are with me still.

I remember an old man reprimanding the narrator, also known as the bookworm, character when he asks what dish was his favorite, telling him it is a great sin to say this dish is good and this dish is bad because there are people in the world who are hungry.

I think about the description of Zorba reaching out his huge hand closing his mistress Boubalina’s eyes with “indescribable tenderness” after she died.

I remember Zorba’s seizing of life at every possible instant, his not taking offense when Boubalina’s parrot calls him by a different name, and, of course, his love of dance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6K7OC-IKnA&w=420&h=315] Yet one of the strongest memories of the book are when Zorba comes across an old man who is planting an almond tree. When Zorba expresses skepticism that the man will live to ever see a single almond, he tells Zorba that he acts as if he will live forever-a statement that elicits Zorba’s retort that he lives every day as if it is his last.

“Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak,” Kazantzakis writes.

I thought of the Greek legend’s words on Thursday, when friend, lawyer and professor Macarena Rodriguez and cognitive science doctoral student Alvaro Graves came and presented to the students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

We're just two classes into the semester at the University of Diego Portales, and I can already tell we're going to have a lot of fun.

Now, I will be honest and say that I’m not exactly sure how many students are in the class at this point.

The class list I received from the department says I've got 16.

Six students attended the first session, two others wrote me explaining why they won't be there for the first two weeks, and eight students, including four who weren't there the first time, went to the second class.

By my reckoning, that makes 12, and I won't know for sure until August 14.

That's the date when the students have to make their final decisions about what they actually are taking for the semester.

Whatever the total we ultimately will have, I can tell we’re in for some lively exchanges and some learning from each other.

In the first class I explained that working with data entails acquiring, cleaning, analyzing, incorporating them into your reporting and displaying them.

There are four major ways to acquire data: writing a freedom of information request; scraping data from websites by writing code and transferring them into a format that can easily be analyzed; downloading existing data; and building a dataset.

Macarena and Alvaro came to talk about the first two options.

Maca spoke first, explaining to the students the origin and key elements of the country’s landmark 2009 transparency legislation.

“There’s no greater disinfectant than sunlight,” one of the slides said.

Macarena proceeded to explain why.

She put Chile’s law in the context of the move by governments around the world over the last 62 year years to institute similar legislation. Finland and Sweden were first in 1951, the United States followed in 1966. Maca also showed a slide of a 2011 world map of the world that indicated by country the states of national transparency laws. (Northern and Central Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia had the biggest holes.)

Although 11 Latin American nations have freedom of information legislation, she talked the students through the history of secrecy that has shrouded many of the countries before going on to talk about key features of the Chilean law like the transparency council that decides on individual requests.

The students peppered her with questions about the council’s composition and the types of records that are subject to the law.

Although the volume of questions meant did not have time to see the sample of a successful information request that Maca had, she has agreed to look at their letters to help refine and make them as precise as possible.

Precision is a critical part of scraping, and Alvaro talked the students through what he and other members of the winning team in a recent Scrapeathon here in Santiago. (For those who don’t know, a scrapeathon is when teams compete in a specific amount of time to pull data from a publicly available site, organize them into an analyzable file and then build some sort of visualization from it.)

Alvaro and his team were interested in looking at school quality in Santiago.

They used the SIMCE, a single number published by the Chilean government that ranges from 200 at the lowest to 300 at the highest.

After pulling the data, the team then merged that information with geographic location and plotted the points on a map using a free tool from Google.

That was just the first phase for the team.

They then moved to show the amount of distance students would have to travel and money parents would have to pay by neighborhood to go to schools of varying quality levels.

The point, unsurprisingly, was that parents in poor neighborhoods would have to pay more and have their children travel farther to have their students attend high-quality schools than their wealthier counterparts.

Again, the students lobbed a series of probing questions at Alvaro.

How did you know where in the neighborhood people live, one student wanted to know.

Alvaro explained that he and the team had scraped the data, joined it and built the site in eight hours, adding that the code they used was open source and available on their Github repository.

The team plans to refine the project, he said.

Time was running very short.

I reminded the students that while we were going to hear from many American journalists during the course, we were starting with Chilean professionals who had studied in Chile and the United States, were available to them as resources and who are in different ways committed to bring the truth about their society to light.

I also repeated that the students’ assignment was to write a 500-word analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each method of data acquisition.

One of the students who had taken notes for the class said they were about 500 words and asked if he could be exempt from the essay.

No.

I took a few pictures of the speakers and students.

Maca zipped out of the door and onto her next task. Alvaro lingered for a while.

Several students asked again to clarify the homework.

Writing freedom of information requests and scraping data may not be the stuff of life and death that Kazantzakis wrote about in his epic novel, but they are different paths to reach the same goal.

On Tuesday we'll see where the students land.

We'll tally their arguments into a list in a Google Spreadsheet, thereby showing them how to build a database.

I can’t wait.

Chilean Chronicles, Part VIII: A Day in Five Parts

The days are getting awfully rich here, and we’ve barely been here 10 days. Breakfast with Santiago Times

Today’s adventures began early over breakfast at Emporio La Rosa in Bellas Artes, a funky, artsy neighborhood situated right between downtown Santiago and our Providencia neighborhood.

Dunreith and I left our place at about 7:15, and, after a brisk walk and some direction asking the old fashioned way-translation: we asked people where to go rather than consulting our cell phones or GPS-we arrived at our destination. Steve Anderson, founder and publisher of the Santiago Times, a longstanding English-only publication that has been online since its inception in 1989, was there to meet us.

Steve, a Texas and Arkansas native with curly, graying hair and a flowery shirt from his recently ended family vacation in Mexico, started the publication a couple of years after arriving toward the end of the Pinochet regime. He came to Chile in 1987 to do social justice work and has been here ever since.

He’s raised a family, bought a farm in Puerto Montt in the southern part of the country with turkeys and hens, and purchased three apartments in Santiago.

One of them houses the paper, which has grown from Steve’s hobby to a well-respected operation that is currently staffed by a blond Aussie editor named Joe Hincliffe, a bearded business manager from Bangor, Maine named Cort Hepler and a rotation of anywhere from eight to 10 interns, most of whom stay for three-month stints.

Steve spoke with pride of Times alums who used their time at the paper as a training ground to orient themselves in Latin America, and who have gone on to work at high-profile outfits like Reuters and Bloomberg elsewhere on the continent.

It’s a financial struggle, though.

Like media enterprises the world over, this one is thinking hard about how to have a viable future.

Over some tasty tostadas with avocado, we identified possible areas of collaboration and specific next steps.

Fulbright Chat

We took a quick jaunt a couple of blocks to check out the apartment/office and then walked with Cort to the Metro stop before zipping north to meet with Antonio Campana, the Fulbright Commission Director here in Chile, and Yunuen Varela, who provided absolutely invaluable logistical assistance for us in the months leading up to our flight two Thursdays ago.

We chatted pleasantly for an hour about the upcoming Fulbright orientation, the state of Chilean journalism and the impending presidential election. Antonio pointed out that former President Michelle Bachelet is trying to do what has not been accomplished in Chile in the more than two decades of post-dictatorship democracy: win a second term.

By law Chilean presidents are only allowed to serve a single term, something Bachelet did from 2006 to 2010.

Although there was a time early in her tenure when her approval rating was quite low, when she left it was at more than 80 percent.

It’s stayed there since, and, as Antonio pointed out, her strategy to avoid having it fall appears to be to make as few public appearances and comments as possible-a latter-day version of the “Rose Garden” tactic Jimmy Carter used to win the 1980 Democratic primaries.

Antonio went so far as to say that a very high percentage of the Chilean voting electorate, when asked, would be unable to explain Bachelet’s political program or the key issues on which she plans to focus, if elected to a second term in office.

His theory in part was that, as opposed to her first campaign, the far left parties are supporting her, and thus she wants to say as little as possible to alienate any members of her coalition.

He attributed Bachelet’s enduring popularity to many Chileans’ identifying with her personal journey of enduring her father’s being killed because he stayed loyal to the country's constitution and to democratically-elected President Salvador Allende in the face of the Pinochet coup, enduring torture, having gone into exile and then having returned. At the same time, he noted that she has been working steadily to increase her own power for the past three decades.

For her part, Yunuen said she was excited that for the first time in Chilean history there are two major presidential candidates who are women.

Mercado Providencia

The conversation wound down, we headed back to the apartment well equipped with a blue Fulbright Chile bag, a to-go coffee mug and a bunch of brochures. A little while later, went to Mercado Providencia, a covered market whose vendors sell all kinds of fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, chicken and meat as well as, in some cases, homemade prepared foods.

Dunreith and I followed a tip we had received and purchased piping hot empanadas from Empanadas Tinita, an empanaderia that we went to just in time because the line stretched to more than two dozen people who waited patiently for their freshly prepared concoctions.

They weren’t disappointed.

Dunreith went for cheese and mushroom, while I had the mariscos, or shrimp, that also had what we are learning of standard ingredients of hefty servings of onions along with eggs and black olives with seeds.

We like to ride our bicycles

Happily sated, we took advantage of the unseasonally warm weather to take our initial ride on the bicycles friends Miguel Huerta and Maca Rodriguez lent us the day after we landed in Santiago.

It took a while to unlock the bikes, adjust the seats and take them to a local bike store to get the tires pumped, and soon enough we were off.

It’s safe to say that it was a very different experience than our traditional jaunt down Lake Shore Drive’s bike path.

To begin, the bikes are much heavier than the ones we have in the United States, our seats kept sliding down as if they had their own will, we stopped repeatedly because of traffic lights, and the terrain is generally much more urban, with plenty of walkers, children, parents and cars with which to contend.

None of it mattered, as once again starting the endless rhythm of cycle stirred something deep and visceral within me.

We returned the bikes to our former apartment, got the makings for a quick snack and then walked down to the Movistar building where I had been invited to talk about our work with data at Hoy.

Data Tuesday

They took place on the second floor of the Movistar Innova building, an incubator zone for startups that had the requisite rows of casually dressed, potential entrepreneurs hunched over the Macbooks and talking in sing-song tones before the presentations began. in a long, high-ceilinged room with images of yellow, orange, pink and white balloons and bordered at each end by semi-circular arches. One part at the front of the room showed the time down to the second, while another at the back automatically calculated the number of people in the room at that moment. (The number ranged from 58 to 60 during the course of the evening.)

I spoke during my presentation about our evolution with data and as a team during the past three years, how we’ve moved from doing very little with data in 2010 to creating infographics in the daily two-page center spread, online photo galleries and a interactive map in 2011. I then explained how in 2012 we hired videographers, produced the Crunch Time series, created Google Fusion Maps, embedded tables in our posts from Google Docs and used Document Cloud to annotate our stories, before moving onto this year, when we built an in-house television studio and our remarkable intern Wil Morales became the driving force behind our food inspections application.

The other presentations were from Nicolas Kaiser-Bril, a French data journalist who started Journalism++, a company that does customized data visualizations and who has also developed free tools like Data Wrapper; Alvaro Graves from the winning team of a recent scrapeathon held in late June who in eight hours built an impressive site designed for parents and policymakers that looks at schools quality, distance and cost in Santiago; and Francisco Kemeny who owns a company named Black Sheep. He gave a very provocative look at big data, social media and choosing metrics that actually matter. (When I told him about being able to write an 800-word piece in Hoy, he said that he could do it in seven Tweets.).

The talks stimulated a bunch of questions, and the conversation continued afterward over tortillas, croquettes, fine wine and absolutely delicious egg custard and a creamy cheesecake- like dessert with strawberry flavor and a flaky crust delivered in a small cup and a smaller spoon

I spoke with Claudia, a reporter from El Mostrador who is very committed to reporting about the intense concentration of power in Chile, knows very little about data, and wants to attend the course I'm going to teach.

We also met Raul, a Colombian programmer from Cali who moved here to work for the big boys, is doing freelance work in Javascript and said there are a lot of high-quality coders in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Peru because those companies have large populations and faltering economies.

Raul contrasted the resources and opportunities for graduates here in Chile compared his country, saying that students here have the luxury of studying what they want and what interests them. In Colombia, he said, young people have to focus on making enough money to support their families.

This sparked a sharp response from Claudia, who cited the high percentage of people in Chile who barely make enough money to get by.

Raul rejoined, talking about the large number of Afro-Colombians who come to Chile chasing an updated version of the American Dream who ended up exploited and without the work they so desperately seek. (I wrote earlier about Donde Mi Negro, a restaurant owned by an Afro-Colombian who, like Raul, comes from Cali.)

Things were really starting to get interesting, especially since the woman serving the desserts had brought out one of the cheesecake ones just for me that blended just perfectly with the rich red wine I had already consumed.

But the crowd was starting to leave, and we did so, too.

It was fine with me.

Although I was not like the guy in the famous “Better get me a bucket” scene of Monty Python fame, I had already had way more than enough material to digest for the next couple of days.

We walked down to the first floor, said our goodbyes in English, French and Spanish to the people who spoke those languages, and once more strode to our apartment, the cool evening air hitting our faces as we went.

We didn't even want to contemplate what things will be like in December.