Back in July of last year, we thought it might be useful to be able to work with the data from the Toronto public school board’s student census, an enormous effort that involves more than 100,000 students and their parents. They’re asked a wide range of questions, from sexual orientation to bullying experiences to their parents’ employment status.

So we filed an FOI request. In the end, the data we were looking for arrived in February, as over 300 .pdf files (one per school) which slowed down our efforts to work with it, to put it mildly.

Some people, including us, have sometimes been clever and/or lucky in being able to scrape data from .pdfs, but in this case we just resorted to data entry. (I got lots of help from intern Elton Hobson.)

Today’s story, the first in a series, focuses on what the survey tells us about cyberbullying in relation to other kinds of bullying. There are lots of maps:

The whole globalnews.ca group of sites relaunched this morning with a responsive-design system on the front end and WordPress VIP on the back end. It went about as smoothly as these things can (fairly). Most of the last week or so was spent on making our interactive projects from the last year or so work in the new system.

Mostly they can be found on the Data Desk Investigations tag page:

… sounds like an Elizabethan insult (‘Thou poxy scapetoad!’) but is actually the name of a program for producing cartogram maps, maps that distort geography based on some value, like population.

It had the usual learning curve.

Our #graphicmonday feature, a story/map/interactive looking at how the College of Cardinals is out of balance with Catholic populations around the world, is our first use of it.