Portuguese High Schools Ranking – Google Docs and Fusion Tables

What else could I do on a Friday night when a newspaper publishes the whole spreadsheet with the Portuguese high school’s ranking? I go for Google Fusion Tables. (Yes, my life is sad…)

It was a nice trial and error process, and it didn’t took that long to finish it. The green pointers are the top 100 hundred, and the green dots go from the 101st to the 200th. I was going after a pattern, and I guess it shows one. It took me one CSI and a half to publish this.

This video was quite useful to grasp the basic concepts behind FusionTables, but it failed to explain what to do when we have several items in the same location. What I did was add a country column, and then merge it with the one that had the name of the school and the county, on Excel. With those three elements Google Maps was more accurate although the outcome is not perfect. There are a lot of misplaced markers but it’s something that could be corrected over a more careful analysis or dedicated slave work  (I need an intern).

Related posts:

1. Recommended Links for May 31st
2. Recommended Links for November 19th
3. Recommended Links for May 27th
4. PortugalDailyView.com: Portuguese news in English
5. Portuguese data scraping experiment: parliament activities and YQL

Alex Gamela é jornalista freelancer e um pensador sobre os novos media, e é Mestre em Jornalismo Online, na Birmingham City University. É o autor do reputado blog The Lake | O Lago, dedicado à evolução e ao futuro do Jornalismo. Este é a continuação do trabalho iniciado aí.