CGNet Swara Stats Mar 22 2011 – Using Google Fusion Tables

I figured I would do a little playing around with Google Fusion Tables and here is the result. Much as I am perturbed by the new privacy policy, Google does have some classy tools.
The data is all real so I suppose this could also serve for a status report 🙂

Locations Talked About On Swara

This is an experiment using Google fusion tables populated with data acquired by passing the transcribed message text on Swara through the Yahoo! Placemaker Service.

Obviously there is margin for error since phrases in some languages might refer to places in English. However, with some error checking thrown in (like a whitelist of countries) the error can be seriously minimized. I was able to produce the map below, which is a fast loading (and tad simpler to build) version of the Swara/Ushahidi Mashup I did a few weeks ago.

The catch of course is that you have to be online to visualize data like this and I didn’t like having to give my data to Google, but I suppose everything has a price….

 

Daily Calls Received By Swara Since Feb 2010:

This is a timeline of calls received by Swara every day since Feb 2010:

 

Call Length Distribution (2012 only) (x Axis=Number of calls, y axis=seconds)

This is my amateurish attempt at producing a histogram of call lengths (in increments of 60 seconds). The Fusion tables don’t come with a histogram feature. It would be nice to be able to aggregate the data into bins and produce a histogram automagically 🙂

 

That’s all for now, will push out more as I come up with them

Video Post: CGNet Swara Founder talks about Democratization of Media at TedX

Shubhranshu Choudhary is a Knight International Journalism Fellow and the founder of CGNet Swara. Shubhranshu was a BBC South Asia producer for more than 10 years. He serves as a media trainer for theBBC World Service Trust, the United Nations and Indian universities.He produced the first television coverage of foreign militants operating in Indian Kashmir and conducted the first television interview with the chief commander of Kashmiri militant organization. He was also a reporter for The Guardian’s South Asia bureau for two years.

Video Post: Voices Across the Digital Divide Presentation

This is a video Arjun recorded while in Indonesia with Internews to replicate the CGNet Swara experiment for RuaiTV in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

RuaiTV are supported locally by AirPutih and Harry Surjadi who is a Knight International Journalism Fellow working with the International Center for Journalists.