After a few semesters of building websites, reporting on in-depth trend stories in our communities and classes full of discussions on what the future of journalism might look like, Ashley and I decided to take all of this preparation and actually do something with it.  We've been doing class projects for years--some that could definitely be considered good, solid journalism--but they were always graded and filed away, never actually doing their job of informing citizens.  So, during our last year of school (or last semester, in Ashley's case), we're building the real deal.  Although this project is technically an independent study under Chris Krug, our professor, it is a real journalistic endeavor for us.

We have been working with Cpt. Tom Easley of the Norman Police Department to gather all the information of every traffic ticket or warning issued in the past year in Norman, Okla.  We have a massive spreadsheet with the date, time, location, issuing officer and violation of the ticket/warning, the make, model, color and state of the car pulled over, and the driver's gender, race and age.  We are in the middle of processing all the information--building spreadsheets for each individual variable and fleshing out the information.  Once we get all this in order, we are going to build a website with a detailed search function so that users may compare any of the variables to find trends.  The website will also eventually contain summaries and infographics of the main trends we've found, and maybe a forum or ability for users to comment on the findings.

Right now, we're excited and overwhelmed with this project.  We initially wanted to look at tickets and warnings for the past five years, but when we found out that just one year of data consists of over 38,000 entries, we agreed to start with that.  Already, we are finding that a lot of the records are incomplete, ambiguous, and that there's no set system for how the information is entered.  Going through and trying to decipher the abbreviations for violations, car models, etc. is taking longer than we thought it would, but getting all of the data cleaned up and organized will make things easier in the long run.

This is my first foray into data journalism, and I'm really excited about it.  The data is straightforward and objective, and we'll definitely see a lot of patterns emerge without having to rely on human opinion.  It's especially thrilling to apply it to the mysterious process of traffic violations--there are so many questions and rumors about how this works, and these can only really be answered through data.  If you asked an officer if they pull over more red cars than others, if they give out more tickets at the end of the month, or other similar questions, you may get an ambiguous answer.  By answering these questions through crunching data, you get undeniable facts.  That's what appeals to me most about data journalism.

Although we don't even have a name for our website yet, we are really optimistic about this project.  Depending on how things go, we will probably continue to work on this long after the semester has ended.  If it's successful, we may expand to other towns and compare their data to Norman's.  Hopefully this will be something widely utilized by citizens and journalists alike, and will promote the endless possibilities that data journalism has to offer.
-Lilly