This hands-on training was given to the journalists in Dec 2013 under OpenNepal banner.

1. Hands-on Training
Data – what and how?
A case of CA Election 70
YoungInnovations
OpenNepal

2. Data → Story
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Find data
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Wrangle/Cleanup the data
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Merge data with others (if any)
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Filter and sort the data
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Analyze data
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Visualize data (story)

3. CA Election 2070
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What is data?
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The candidates (age, gender, party)
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The constituencies (vdc, ward, party)
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The results (with votes, winner)
–
…..

4. Where to find it?
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http://election.gov.np
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The following FPTP results data in XML

5. Not lucky every time finding data
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Scrapping (requires programming knowledge)
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Using google scraper
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PDF conversion
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PDF manual transcribe

6. Chrome Scraper Extension
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Search for “Chrome extension Scraper” from
Chrome browser to install

7. Scraper in Action

8. PDF to Text
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Online tools available
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Linux has different set of utilities
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PDF is still a big nuisance (though something is
better than nothing)

9. PDF to Text
http://www.election.gov.np/election/uploads/fil
es/ecn_report/constwisecandidatecount.pdf

10. PDF to Text
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Linux utility - pdftotext

11. CSV
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●
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CSV - Comma Separated Value
Opens in MS Excel, Open Office, Google
Spreadsheet
Easy to work with

12. CA XML Data to CSV

13. XML to CSV?
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Online services are available
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Might need help from technologist
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In linux (there might be several ways, e.g)
xml2 < FPTP-CA70.xml | 2csv FPTP
DISTNAME CONST CANDIDATE AGE SEX
PARTYNAME SYMBOLNAME TOTALVOTE
STATUS > FPTP-CA70.csv

14. OpenNepal
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Repository of datasets
–
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data in csv, xml or json format
Request for dataset
Request for help in conversion from one format
to another, scrapping data, ...
OpenNepal Community (GoogleGroup) is very
vibrant

15. CA Results CSV data
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Converted from XML
http://dev.yipl.com.np/data-training/data/FPTP-CA70.csv

16. Processing/Cleaning CSV – Basics
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Add header
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Sorting (by different fields)
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Filter
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Simple formulas

17. Add headers
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Insert row at the top
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Add header for each column

18. Sorting
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Sorting by Age – Ascending, Descending
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Find out youngest winning candidate age

19. Filtering
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Filter the list of winning female candidates

20. Some exercise
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Are there people who didn't receive a single vote?
What is the highest and lowest number of votes of
candidate who didn't win?
Find the percentage of female and male
candidates, percentage of winning female
candidates?
Try the above exercise in one district of your
interest?
Think of other things you can do with this basic
skills

21. More questions
●
●
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How many parties have candidates in all 240
constituencies?
How many male and female candidates are
there in Nepali Congress? Ratio of male-female
in far-west districts?
Which party has the highest number of female
candidates?

22. Data Processing - Pivottable

23. PivotTable - more
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Breakdown of
independent
candidates

24. Lets again see numbers
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Sorted by total
number of
candidates

25. Visualization
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Bar graph of male-female candidates of top few
districts

26. What else visualizations are
possible?
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https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

27. What else visualizations are
possible?
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https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

28. Geocoding
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Geo-coding
–
–
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the conversion of a human-readable location name
into a numeric (or other machine-processable)
location such as a longitude and latitude
Kathmandu => [geocoding] => {latitude: 27.70169,
longitude: 85.3206}
Online tools available for geocoding
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Google fusion table
–
cartodb

29. Lat-long in maps.google.com
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Put the lat long (27.70169 85.3206) in google
map search box

30. Services available for geocoding
http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/sea
rch?format=xml&q=Kathmandu,Nepal

31. Problems with this CSV
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Unicode in districts name
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Can't geocode (currently only english)

32. Adding english district name
http://dev.yipl.com.np/data-training/data/FPTP-CA70-eng.csv

33. Google Fusion Table
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tables.googlelabs.com (need @gmail account)

34. Imported data

35. Geocoding

36. Using filter in the map

37. Use of heatmap based on votes

38. Thank you