Tools, Slides and Links from NICAR12

One of the most popular posts on Ricochet was the collection of dataviz tools, slides and links from last year’s NICAR conference.

It was so popular, in fact, that people have asked me to make a similar collection again. So from Feb. 23–26, I’ll be updating this post with all the great things NICARians have to share this year.

Follow #NICAR12 on Twitter for the buzz; come to this page for the goods. And if you’re attending the conference, be sure to buy a T-shirt to support IRE, the organization that puts this fantastic event together. Ben Welsh of The Los Angeles Times is taking candid photos and posting them on Flickr.

Have links from sessions you attended? Post them in comments or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva and I’ll add them to this list.

Jump to Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
 

Presentations & Tutorials

• Bringing Maps to Fruition (from Michelle Minkoff)
• Free tools for scraping data without programming (from Chris Keller and Michelle Minkoff)
• Instructions for Hands-on Web Scraping Without Programming (from Chris Keller and Michelle Minkoff)
• Locating the Story: The Latest in Online Maps and mapping links (from Ben Welsh)
• Mapping links & presentation (from David Herzog)
• Social Media Sleuthing (from Doug Haddix)
• freeDive Tips & Tricks (from the Knight Digital Media Center)
• CAR on a Shoestring (from Kevin Crowe, Patrick Sweet and Mary Jo Webster)
• Regular Expressions: An Introduction (from Kevin Crowe, Patrick Sweet and Mary Jo Webster)
• Create a moderation form using Google Forms and Fusion Tables
• Scraping with Django (from Kevin Schaul)
• How to turn PDFs into a searchable, sortable table (from Kevin Schaul)
• Get the Most Out of Fusion Tables (from Rebecca Shapley)
• Data viz in 20 minutes: jQuery DataTables (from Christopher Schnaars)
• How to set up Python in Windows 7 (from Anthony DeBarros)
• Data visualization best practices (from Kat Downs)
• NodeXL for Network analysis (from Peter Aldhous)
• Network Analysis for News (from Peter Aldhous and Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe)
• Network analysis for news (video of Peter Aldhous’s NICAR12 talk)
• How to Use Google Refine for Investigative Journalism (from Dan Nguyen)
• Mapping is for Everyone – How to make all kinds of maps (from Sharon Machlis)
• Advanced Excel techniques tipsheet (from MaryJo Webster)
• How do you edit a story made of software? (from Alexander Howard)
• Election Night Results & Maps (from John Keefe)
• Covering Elections presentation (from Al Shaw)
• Making friends with map projections (from Ben Welsh and Michael Corey)
• Database validation (from JT Johnson)
• Web scraping with Node.js (from Al Shaw)
• Who is John Doe — and where to get the paper on him
• Practical TastyPie for the Modern Djangonaut (from Jeremy Bowers)
• Weathering the Storm: Using data to bolster the traditional weather story (from Stephen Stirling)
• Build your first Django news app (from the IRE NICAR12 Django workshop)
• GeoCommons walkthrough (from Paul Monies)
• QGIS 1 workshop tutorial (from Michael Corey)
• Tell Me a Story! – storytelling and data journalism (from Anthony DeBarros)
• Human-assisted reporting: How to create robot reporters in your own image (from Ben Welsh)
• How I learned to stop worrying and love flat files (from Ben Welsh)
• Infect the CMS (from Jacob Harris)
• Inspect the Web With Your Browser’s Web Inspector (from Dan Nguyen)
• An Intro to R (from Jacob Fenton)
• Slides from “Mapping is Hard” (from Brian Boyer)
• TileMill hands-on tutorial (from Chris Amico, Brian Boyer and Matt Stiles)
• Own Your Map Stack (from Chris Amico, Brian Boyer and Matt Stiles)
• Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) basics (from Jacob Perkins)
• Connecting to state data using OpenMissouri.org (from David Herzog)
• How to convert PDFs to Excel in Windows (from IRE)
• Quantum GIS (QGIS) 2 workshop (from Michael Corey)
• How to turn PDFs into text (from Dan Nguyen)
• Web scraping in Python workshop tutorial (from Mark Ng)
• Infiltrate the Ad Department (from Ryan Pitts)
• Map Graphics for Video (from Michael Corey)
• What We Can Find Out from Elections (from Aaron Bycoffe)
• The Latest in Mapping with Javascript and jQuery (from Timothy Barmann)
• How to Make a PANDA (from Brian Boyer)
• The Farenthold Surprise (election panel presentation from Derek Willis)
• Displaying data geographically: Creating a one-layer map in ArcMap (from Tom Meagher)
• An intro to csvKit (from Christopher Groskopf and Anthony DeBarros)
• Integrating CAR into a daily Beat (from Kate Martin)
• How to use the SIMILE Exhibit timeline framework (from David Karger)
• Tableau training handouts (from Tableau)
• CAR Training 2012 including mapping data sets, practice data sets and tip sheets (from Jennifer LaFleur)

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Software & Tools

• Twazzup – find breaking news, popular hashtags, influential users
• Reporters’ Lab Reviews – a link list of tools, techniques and research for public affairs reporting
• Twellow – a yellow pages for Twitter
• Twiangulate – find sources and groups of people on Twitter
• Crowdbooster – monitor and analyze buzz on social media sites
• KnowEm Username Search – finds the social networks a person or organization/brand is using
• Muckrack Pro – add yourself to the list of journalists or find journalists covering a particular topic
• The Archivist – save tweets and export to Excel to analyze later
• PowerPivot for Excel – “Load massive amounts of data from virtually any source, process in seconds and model with powerful analytical capabilities”
• Pandoc – a universal document converter
• HTML-to-PDF – converts HTML to PDF docs for free
• Mr. Data Converter – converts Excel data into one of several Web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.
• Natural Language Toolkit – for machine language text analysis
• Voyant Tools – Web-based document analysis
• ClearForest Gnosis – Firefox plugin that uses OpenCalais for data extraction
• Exhibit – a publishing framework for data-rich interactive web pages
• DocumentCloud – store, analyze and annotate PDFs
• DataTables – jQuery plugin to create sortable datasets
• Ben Welsh’s triumvirate of tools that allow you to copy Google Maps’ functionality:
   – a data source, like OpenStreetMap
   – a tile set, like what you can make with TileMill
   – a JavaScript interface, like Leaflet
• OpenOffice – open source office suite software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation/slide deck, database)
• QGIS – Open source geographic information system
• Shape to Fusion (a.k.a. Shpescape) – Import shapefiles to Fusion Tables
• MySQL – Database software
• Google Refine – data cleaner
• Junar – Discover and track data
• The Overview Project
• Visicheck – ensures your graphics are visible to the colorblind
• Colorbrewer – in case you need help with color schemes for your design
• Color Oracle – colorblindness simulator for Mac OS, Windows and Linux
• 0 to 255 – find variations of any color
• Beautiful Soup – useful for many things, including parsing HTML
• Weave – Web-based analysis and visualization environment. Made by a partnership between the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Open Indicators Consortium
• Highcharts – create interactive JavaScript charts (free for non-commercial use)
• Indiemapper – Upload shapefiles and convert them to create static, thematic maps
• CSV-to-JSON converter
• Sinatra a lightweight Ruby/Rails framework for creating apps
• Use Google Docs, XPath and the =importxml() function to put data in a spreadsheet
• PANDA Project
• Timemap syncs a SIMILE timeline to a web-based map
• Tabletop – allows you to use Google spreadsheets as your app backend
• Js2Coffee – converts Javascript to CoffeeScript and back
• CoffeeScript sandbox
• iPL2 – ask a librarian, search through the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) websites.
• “Lesson of the night: Want to put census geos in fusion tables? Keep it stupid simple: convert US Census data from TIGER into shape files with shpescape” — tip from Matt Kiefer
• Rubular – a Ruby regular expression editor
• Timeline Setter – makes timelines from spreadsheets
• Spoofcard changes your voice and gives you a temporary phone number
• Tablechart turns HTML tables into charts
• Spam Mimic – hide a message in spam
• FEC scraper/FEC parser – Chris Schnaars’ script on Github

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References

• The American Library Association’s wiki of government databases (from Dan Nguyen)
• Penn Treebank Project reference – Use it in conjunction with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)
• Geomedia Google Group
• NICAR-L mailing list
• Google Public Data Explorer
• InfoVis Wiki – a catchcall list of papers, conferences, patterns and jobs in information visualization
• Spatial Reference – an IMDB-like catalog of spatial reference systems
• 22 free visualization tools collected by ComputerWorld
• Free Data Visualization tools – a collection from Sharon Machlis
• 8 cool tools for data analysis, visualization and presentation (from Sharon Machlis)
• Chart and image gallery: 30 free tools for data visualization and analysis (from Sharon Machlis)
• LocalHealthData.org – find health data from more than 70 sources and 300+ datasets
• Analytic Journalism “It’s not ‘all about story’ if you don’t have anything to say.”
• How to install MySQL and Navicat on Windows
• Freebase – an entity graph/Wikipedia-like collection of data
• Save the Post Office – records U.S. post office consolidations and closures
• Los Angeles Times datadesk Github repository with code for you to use
• USASpending.gov – Official record of Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (Transparency Act)
&bull: Data for the Public Good by Alexander Howard (free eBook)
• CongressionalPrimaries.org shows what Illinois congressional candidates are tweeting about
• Civic Commons Marketplace collects open government efforts in the U.S.
• OpenCorporates is in the process of collecting information on every corporate entity in the world
• USA Today’s Developer Network

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Work Samples

• Bailed out banks profit from tax liens (Arizona Star heat maps showed property locations, making the story very clear)
• Race gap found in traffic stops (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel showed the racial disparity in pullovers and on further examination, municipal maintenance requests)
• Texas redistricting map and slider code (Texas Tribune)
• The Poverty Gap shows a clear correlation between poverty and access to education (ProPublica)
• 2012 Election Results big board, one approach to visual presentation of election info that tells you the story of the election immediately (The New York Times)
• Little Loving County grabs a bit of Texas’ growth a census story unlike the usual census stories (The Dallas Morning News)
• Riot rumours: how misinformation spread on Twitter during a time of crisis uses data analysis to watch the spread and suppression of rumors about the London riots (The Guardian)
• Discover Boston Public Schools (Code for America)
• SchoolBook makes teacher data reports for New York City schools
• Redistricting: New lines leave some voters without a senator (The [Riverside, Calif.] Press-Enterprise)

Jump to Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples

And finally, no journalism nerdfest would be complete without a demonstration of the latest hotness: Drone journalism by Matt Waite.

Drone Journalism Demo – Matt Waite from John Keefe on Vimeo.