What can analyzing Facebook tell us about…us? Stephen Wolfram has some ideas. Some interesting visual choices here, too.

Andrew McAfee admonishes political pundits talking out of their behinds when it comes to data.

Reading Jacob Harris’s chronicle of his efforts to compile a data set on food recalls reminded me of a conversation I had about a year ago with a programmer friend of mine in Austin. At the time I was taking a course at J-School in HTML/CSS, JavaScript and JQuery. When I told my friend this, he wasn’t happy. “You’re a writer!” he said. “You’re not supposed to worry about code! That’s what programmers are for!” Reading about Rails scripts for scraping data and using the Document Object Model to parse HTML made me long for a time when that was true. (It also made me want to not eat anything ever again.)

But personal reflections aside, Harris’s post made some good philosophical points to keep in mind when working with data, apart from any questions of coding. It’s all too easy in journalism to think you know what the story is and then to go looking for information that confirms the story, and ignore counterexamples. (For examples of this, see most of human thought.) On the surface, having a bunch of hard, precise-looking numbers in front of you would seem to mitigate that— but the opposite can be true. The data can’t tell the reporter what its limitations are. It’s up to the reporter to figure out what the unknowns, limitations and biases are hidden beneath the veneer of objectivity.

It is easy to think we know more than we know, and when we’re tasked with explaining the goings-on in the world, the temptation to overstate cause and effect can seem irresistible. But properly interrogated data can help us tell better stories and— perhaps more importantly— tell us what we don’t know.

In a blog post, the Times looks at the changes in contribution sources.

But a plethora of more or less inventive playing with the possibilities of maps.

Real time mapping of who the next Pope will be. A slider lets you pick the top N candidates and see their odds change over time. One quibble: my name isn’t on there. A man can dream though…a man can dream.