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Grüessech!

My name is Timo Grossenbacher, I live in Switzerland, and I work as reporter/coder for SRF Data, the data journalism unit of Swiss Radio and TV, based in Zurich. There I analyze and visualize data, investigate data-driven stories and manage projects.

I’m a geographer by training. I hold a MSc degree in Geographic Information Science from the University of Zurich.

I also teach data journalism for political science graduates at the University of Zurich. I co-organize Hacks/Hackers Zurich and created Rddj.info to help data journalists get started with R.

Check out my latest blog posts or the growing list of projects I have published.

Contact me through timo(at)timogrossenbacher.ch (PGP), check out my GitHub account and follow me on Twitter.

Disclaimer: This site uses the free and open source Piwik for web analytics. All collected data remain on my server.

Recent blog posts

This is what happens when you use different package versions, Larry!

Recently I made a point for “true” RMarkdown reproducibility via checkpointed package versions. Shortly thereafter I learned the hard way how crucial it is to use exactly the same R packages that were used when the script was initially written.

A (truly) reproducible R workflow

Since more than two years I have been preaching reproducibility and transparency in data journalism. My tool of choice: R and reproducible reports with RMarkdown.
But these reports aren’t really reproducible. A solution.

Beautiful thematic maps with ggplot2 (only)

In this blog post, I explain step by step how I (eventually) achieved a nice thematic map with pure ggplot2 – from a very basic, useless, ugly, default map to the publication-ready and (in my opinion) highly aesthetic choropleth.

Why data journalists should start using R in 2016

For me, 2015 was the year of R. The year I finally started to use R productively and on an almost daily basis (after years of learning and forgetting and learning all over again). In this post, I share my experiences and tell you why you should start using it for your next data journalism project in 2016.

A selection of projects I was involved in

Mapping urban sprawl in Switzerland

Urban sprawl is one of Switzerland’s (few) biggest environmental problems. In this interactive explainer, we provided readers with a very personal perspective on the phenomenon.

Here’s how 670’000 people speak German

Based on crowdsourced answers to 25 dialect questions (e.g. how somebody pronounces a word), we produced very detailed maps of the regional distribution of German word pronunciations. We collected over 670’000 points representing residencies of people and aggregated them to hexagons in order to display them on interactive maps.

Vested interests of Swiss universities

In our largest data-driven research so far we examined the vested interests of Swiss universities. We researched, among other things, more than 1000 secondary employments of professors and more than 300 sponsored professorships. The investigation resulted in publications in dozens of different radio and television programs of the Swiss Public Broadcast SRF.

Rddj.info

As I outlined in a post, the statistical software environment R is becoming more and more popular among journalists. However, finding an entry point to the R programming language is not that easy, especially for people without programming experience. That’s why I build the continuously updated Rddj.info – a resource collection for learning how to do data journalism with R.

Implications of the new Swiss surveillance law

End of September 2016, the Swiss people accepted a new federal law that grants the intelligence agency new competences, e.g. the agency can now search Internet traffic that “leaves or enters” the country for suspicious keywords (similar to XKEYSCORE).
Questioning whether one can actually speak of an “outside” or “inside” when it comes to Internet traffic, we wanted to explain the reader if it is theoretically possible to be surveilled when browsing a Swiss website.

Switzerland’s dual-use exports

Dual-use goods are goods that can be used for civil and military purposes. In Switzerland, these goods are governed with a special legislation – unlike in other countries, where they are looked at as conventional arms exports. At SRF Data, we took the effort to parse and visualize the recently released data from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO.

«Sandalen im Schnee»

As one of the first projects at SRF Data we published a web documentary, called «Sandalen im Schnee» (sandals in the snow), about the asylum seeking process in Switzerland. The migrant crisis was at its peak and we wanted to explain and document the controversially discussed Swiss asylum seeking process – without resorting too much to the emotional side and without taking party.

«Sprachatlas» – an interactive dialect quiz for the German-speaking region

Inspired by the hugely successful New York Times dialect quiz, our team at Tages-Anzeiger, consisting of me and Marc Brupbacher, teamed up with language scientist Dr. Adrian Leemann (back then conducting research at the University of Zurich) to launch a similar application for the German-speaking region. Dr. Leemann provided the data and I was responsible for coding the frontend. The project was a huge success.

The Spatial Distribution of Swiss Soccer Fans

Together with fellow data journalists Mario Stäuble, Patrice Siegrist and Julian Schmidli, I realized this CartoDB-based map of the distribution of Swiss soccer fans while I was still working for Tages-Anzeiger. Find a detailed description and implementation details on the CartoDB-Map-of-the-Week-Blog.

Tippinho – The Data Driven Soccer Prediction Game

About a month before the start of the 2014 soccer world cup in Brazil, my colleague and fellow data journalist Julian Schmidli, with whom I worked together at Tages-Anzeiger and now at SRF Data, came up with the idea of creating an interactive soccer prediction game. Not an ordinary one, but one that would assist users in finding an optimized prediction for all encounters, based on the variables they would judge important for winning the tournament.

SoMePolis Twittermonitor

Together with my friends from the SoMePolis project, I drafted, designed and implemented an interactive application which allows to monitor and analyze the Twitter accounts of Swiss parliament members.

Global Oil Production & Consumption Since 1965

This “Atlas der Globalisierung”-inspired visualization, based on very recent data by BP, allows the reader to quickly grasp the temporal and spatial differences in oil consumption and production.

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New on R-bloggers.com

Update on Our ‘revisit’ Package August 17, 2017 matloff
Visualising Water Consumption using a Geographic Bubble Chart August 17, 2017 Peter Prevos
Use the LENGTH statement to pre-set the lengths of character variables in SAS – with a comparison to R August 16, 2017 Eric Cai - The Chemical Statistician

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