Carleton University’s Christopher Waddell, director of the School of Journalism and Communication, working with students and the CBC, led a project to record and map all federal government announcements on MP and departmental web sites in 2013. The project gives Canadians a way to see how and where the federal government spends their money (http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-funding).

“We listed all 2013 grants and contributions on web sites of the 308 members of Parliament,” said Waddell. ”We wanted announcement dates, recipient of the money, project description, dollar value, the URL announcing the funding, the federal department or agency providing the money, the federal constituency in which the recipient of the funds is located, the member of Parliament for that constituency and his or her party affiliation and that MP’s 2011 margin of victory.”

In addition to the spending announcements on the websites of individual MPs, the project team collected the same information from all 2013 news releases on the Economic Action Plan website and the news releases on the websites of all government departments.

For the purposes of the project, the country was divided into 21 regions and each one was assigned to a student. Students pulled details off websites and inserted the data into spreadsheets.

“Each student is doing a story for the CBC site about the project or something we discovered along the way,” said Waddell. “By mid-January, the size of the project threatened to swamp us as we had underestimated the work.

“Data journalism can turn up fascinating results, but as the class told me bluntly, filing out spreadsheets, using postal codes to find MPs and looking up individual 2011 election results is indescribably boring.”

The team learned that data quality control is essential and that everyone involved had to enter everything exactly the same way. For example, is the riding name Winnipeg-Centre or Winnipeg Centre? Even with several layers of editing there may be errors that were not caught. The team is hoping that if readers find errors online they will report them to be corrected.

“The finished project has more than 2,700 announcements, but we know it’s not perfect, as we couldn’t do all federal departments and agencies,” said Waddell. “It does, though, at least capture all the announcements on MP websites and the action plan site too.”

Media Contact
Steven Reid
Media Relations Officer
Carleton University
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Steven_Reid3@Carleton.ca

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