Totally.Digital data
Data journalism at Totally.Digital, from the 2015 ambulance map to today
Totally has built data pieces for the press since 2014: a map of where Britain takes its selfies that MailOnline ran in February 2015, an interactive map of ambulance response times by postcode that the Guardian Datablog covered in May 2015, and now a section of interactive charts and maps rebuilt from official UK statistics every time they are published.
Vain Britain: the selfie map, January 2015
The first piece took every Instagram post tagged #selfie with a location in the UK between 1 November 2014 and 5 January 2015 and placed it on a map, built with the open source mapping tool CartoDB for the personalised gift site Create It Now. Corrected for population, Brighton took the most selfies of any city, Manchester was second with 6.6 selfies per 100,000 residents and Greater London third with 5.7, with a borough by borough map of London held back for the first outlet to run the story.
Coverage: MailOnline, 4 February 2015, ‘Hawaii, Brighton and London borough of Westminster take the most selfies’, by Victoria Woollaston, with two links to the map.
The map itself is no longer online; the Create It Now site has changed hands since.
Ambulance response times by postcode, April 2015
In November 2014 Totally’s data journalist, Duarte Romero-Varela, sent Freedom of Information requests to all 14 UK ambulance services asking for the response time of every 999 call since 2010, about 30 million records. Thirteen services answered; the Isle of Wight refused. The result, launched at the end of April 2015 at ambulanceresponsetimes.co.uk, was an interactive map of the UK by postcode district: the median response to life threatening calls in 2013 to 2014, the share answered within eight minutes, and the trend over three years, modelled on the Los Angeles Times’ ‘How fast is LAFD’ graphic. The methodology was published in full on the map.
Coverage: the Guardian Datablog, 1 May 2015, ‘Find out speed of ambulance response times in your UK postcode area’; Google Maps Mania, 5 May 2015; the Daily Record, 5 June 2015.
The old site is no longer online. Its data stops at 2014 and uses the Red 1, Red 2 and Category A definitions that the NHS replaced in 2017, so the work now lives here: its replacement, ambulance response times in your area, uses NHS England’s monthly figures by service and category and will gain a new postcode layer from a fresh round of Freedom of Information requests.
The section today
Each page in the data section takes one official dataset and rebuilds it so that it answers the question for the reader’s own area, with a table view, the source and edition in the footer and the limits of the data stated on the page:
- A&E waiting times by hospital, NHS England, monthly
- Ambulance response times in your area, NHS England, monthly
- Average pay by council area, and the years of pay a home costs, ONS, annual
- Business openings and closures in your area, ONS, annual and quarterly
- Private rents by area, ONS, monthly
The charts and images may be reused with a credit and a link to the page they came from.
PR network members: we can do this for you
If you are a member of the GlobalCom PR Network, or another PR agency, Totally.Digital builds pieces like these for your clients. We find the dataset, build the interactive page and the static images, write the methodology and the data limits, and refresh the page when the publisher releases new figures. You take the story to the press. A piece built from published data takes two to three weeks; one built from Freedom of Information requests takes the 20 working day statutory period plus the build.
Contact Totally.Digital with the subject or the dataset you have in mind.
Built by Totally.Digital. Sources: the 2015 project brief, press releases and emails held by Totally; MailOnline, 4 February 2015; the Guardian Datablog, 1 May 2015.