Saturday, 11 October 2014

Data Story Update # 1



I’ve decide to based my story off five different data sets examining trends in motor vehicle fatalities in BC.
These data sets are available on the provincial government’s open data portal, and examine fatalities by region, gender, accident type, involvement of alcohol and drugs, and what month the accidents occurred. All the sets cover data from 1996 to 2012. 

I believe this will be a good basis for a news story because at a first glance the data seems to show a decline overall for fatalities in car accidents, but with that decrease there are an increases of individual trend as well (number of motorcycle deaths for example). Asking an expert about variation in certain trends may prove useful, but also finding a more human element to the story should be important. 

As far as the actual data is structured it is fairly straight forward, however how some of the criteria are formatted by year will be tricky to tidy up. 

Questions I would like to answer this data:

How has motor vehicle fatalities increase or decreased? What year had the most fatalities and which year has the least?
What region has the most fatalities? Which region has the least? What region has decreased the most? Which has increased the most?
Which gender has the most fatalities? How has that changed over time?
Which months have the most and least fatalities? How has that change over time?