Computer ‘assisted’ researching and using spreadsheets – trials and tribulations

I marvel at the diversities of this new media course – one day I am learning XHTML coding, the next its all about how to use sound recording equipment and today I’ve been working on Microsoft Exel. This certainly is all about multi-media and exploiting every available tool which can aid the ‘new age’ journalist.

This component of the course opened my eyes to the mind-boggling amount of information on the web and the ways in which journalists can and should utilise this vast resource in a more reliable and effective manner. I have also learnt that more traditional methods and tools such as Excel have great advantages, especially when used in tandem with the often random and badly organised data on the web.

The assignment we were set, to tabulate certain crime statistics for Grahamstown, Johannesburg, East London and Mangaung (formerly Bloemfontein), led to some lessons which we all unfortunately had to learn the hard way. Basically the web does not have all the information you want in an easy-to-find and easy-to-use format. All of the new media students were in various states of hysteria, trying to find municipality population statistics – important information which one would assume the government has made available. Instead, we struggled to find the information even on the official Stats S.A website. Once we did find the information it was tabulated with codes, which first had to be accessed before you knew which statistics were for certain cities.

Once the relevant statistics had been found, it was really easy to take it across to Excel and make some useful and easy to understand graphs. One such graph (for murders per capita) is displayed above.

In terms of the results of the data, I am now fighting the urge to run as far away from Grahamstown as possible – all of the crimes investigated were by far the highest in Grahamstown over any of the other cities. In fact, Grahamstown's crimes per capita are three times higher than the next highest, which was East London. It is also interesting to note that the order of highest to lowest crime rates remained the same throughout each of the four different types of crimes investigated. On all accounts, Mangaung seems the safest place to live, as their crime rates were extremely low.

All that said, I now have to head home, in the dark, on my own and with all these frightening crime rates running through my head – thanks Jude for making me paranoid (but at the same time you taught me a whole lot)!