NICAR13 brings together some of the sharpest minds and most experienced hands in investigative journalism. Over four days, people share, discuss and teach techniques for hunting leads, gathering data, and presenting stories. Of all the conferences I go to, this one gets the highest marks from attendees for intensive, immediately applicable learning; networking and fun.
No one could possibly absorb and remember everything presented, so below is your memory card. If you’re looking for highlights from this list, read my NICAR13 roundup for Nieman Lab, “Data science, commoditized backends, and the need to know code.”
Have links from sessions you attended? Post them in comments or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva and I’ll add them to this list.
If you’re looking for a job, IRE keeps a list of open positions. Here’s who’s hiring.
NICAR 2014 will be in Baltimore from Feb. 27 to March 2. You should be there.
For additional tutorials, videos, presentations and tips see the lists from 2012 and 2011.
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
Presentations & Tutorials
• Dashboards for Reporting (from Aaron Bycoffe, Jacob Harris & Derek Willis)
• Data Science for Nerdy Journalists (from Hadley Wickham)
– Sisi Wei shares her class notes
• Data Scraping with Google Docs (from Sean Sposito)
• How to create an automatically updating Google spreadsheet (from Sharon Machlis)
• Demystifying Web Scraping (from Sean Sposito & Acton Gordon)
• Campaign Finance the Data Science Way (from Chase Davis)
• Exploratory Data Analysis (from Chase Davis)
• Hone your Google Fusion Tables training skills tutorial (from Sreeram Balakrishnan)
• Data Mining Machine Learning (from Jeff Larson)
• Practical Machine Learning (from Chase Davis & Jeff Larson)
• Journalism, Branding & Social Media (from Mandy Jenkins)
• Social media search tips and tools (from Doug Haddix)
• How the Los Angeles Times uses DocumentCloud (from Ben Welsh)
• Using Excel for Data Analysis (from Krista Kjellman Schmidt)
• Excel I: Sorting and filtering (from Linda Johnson)
• Excel II: Rates and Ratios (from Denise Malan)
• Excel Magic: Advanced functions for data cleaning and more | Excel data (from MaryJo Webster)
• Make Your First News App with Django
• Data on the Fly (from John Keefe & Mark Wert)
• Digging Deep with Data Journalism (from Jill Riepenhoff)
• Information Design & Crossing the Digital Divide (from Helene Sears)
• Dataviz on a shoestring (from Sharon Machlis)
• Introduction to Ruby (from Al Shaw)
• The Data Driven Story: Conceiving & Launching (from Jennifer LaFleur & David Donald)
• Dataviz, Responsive Web Design + Mobile: Friends or Frenemies? (from Miranda Mulligan & Pete Karl II)
• Quick steps to mastering SQL through SQLite (from Troy Thibodeaux)
– Emma Carew Grovum shares her notes from the tutorial
• Reporting without revealing: Tools for hiding your tracks (from Paula Lavigne)
• Covert reporting using technology to cover your tracks (from Mike Tigas)
• Learning Python for journalists (from Jeremy Bowers & Serdar Tumgoren)
– Ask to join the Google group
• Fun with data in sports journalism (from Jack Gillum)
• After the game: Top data ideas for investigating $port through $pending (from Paula Lavigne)
• Is 911 a Joke in Your Town? (from Ben Welsh)
• Sample code for Introduction to JavaScript the Right Way (from Jeff Larson)
• Food waste investigations (from Erin Jordan)
• Government waste investigations (from Tim Eberly)
• Investigating government waste (from Josh Sweigart)
• OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) slides and cheat sheet (from Tom Meagher)
• How can we get the widest impact out of software projects? (from Rich Gordon)
• How to be ready for your social media Sandy (on discovery, validation and publication) (from Steve Myers)
• Github repo and example code from Developing reusable visualization components using D3 and Backbone.js (from Alastair Dant)
• Code for drought maps & Data & code .zip file (from Amanda Cox)
• Web scraping with Node.js (from Al Shaw)
• Zip file for Python workshops 1 & 3 | Github repo (from Ron Campbell)
• Tip sheet for Python workshop 2, plus dataset for the workshop (from Christopher Schnaars)
• Mike Ball shares his notes from Tasneem Raja’s Smarter interactive Web projects with Google Spreadsheets and Tabletop.js talk
• Data Roadmaps: Priming your desktop with certain data slices helps you spot trends, find people and understand your city (from T.L. Langford)
• Making Health Data Sexy (from Charles Ornstein)
• Infect the CMS (from Heather Billings, Jacob Harris and Al Shaw)
• Making interactives fun | List of interactives shown during the talk (from Tasneem Raja and Sisi Wei)
• Covering public pensions (from MaryJo Webster)
• Learn to use Git and Github and fork this cheat sheet (from Tom Meagher)
• Making Timelines (from Krista Kjellman Schmidt and Lena Groeger)
• Inside baseball: What data journalism can learn from sports (from Jeremy Bowers, Ryan Pitts and Matt Waite
• Disasters: Preparing for and digging in after the storm (from Ben Poston)
• 5 data journalism projects you might not have seen before and why they matter in Europe (from Sebastian Mondial)
• The One-Query Story (from Kate Martin)
• Mapping Best Practices (from Dave Cole, John Keefe and Matt Stiles)
• Web Scraping (and more) with Google Apps Script (from Steven Melendez)
• NodeXL for Network Analysis (from Peter Aldhous)
• Data-driven Beats (from Chris Amico)
• Bringing Excel to the Web with SkyDrive (from Cathy Harley)
• Navigating U.S. Census Data (from Erran F. Persley)
• How to Serve Mad Traffic, Part I (from Jeremy Bowers)
• How to Serve Mad Traffic, Part II (from Jacqui Maher)
Lightning Talks
• 5 Algorithms in 5 Minutes | Video (from Chase Davis)
• Let’s make games for news | Video (from Sisi Wei)
• Big datasets, small streams | Video (from Katie Park)
• Z-Scores: How You Can Compare Apples With Oranges (downloads a PowerPoint file) | Video (from Robert Gebeloff)
• Casino-Driven Design | Video (from Al Shaw)
• Be your wn Nate Silver | Video (from Jeff Larson)
• ILENE, the polite coding language | Video (from Jennifer LaFleur and Jeff Larson)
• Every State is Weird: A selection of election edge cases | Video (from Jacob Harris)
• Dude Who Stole My Congressman? (Data in .xls | Visualization) (from Paul Parker)
• Code for the Arduino Baggage Handler | Video (from Matt Waite)
• “Django Retrained: 5 ways coding like a web developer can make you a better investigative reporter” | Slides (from Ben Welsh)
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
Software & Tools
• BatchGeo
• ChangeDetection.com – monitor website changes
• Citizen Quotes – A project to demonstrate maximum entropy models for extracting quotes from news articles in Python.
• CometDocs converts PDFs to Word and Excel docs
• Tabula for pulling data out of PDFs
• Tried and true XPDF (PDFtoText)
• DocHive PDF to XML converter
• Python wrapper for the Document Cloud API
• DownThemAll Firefox plug-in for downloading website assets (photos, video, etc.)
• Embed Excel Interactive View into your site
• Fast Cluster, a command line tool for grouping documents by similarity (from Jeff Larson)
• FOIA Machine (automate your Freedom of Information requests)
• Geofeedia search and monitor social media by location
• iWitness from Adaptive Path – search social media content by time and place
• OpenRefine (the open source repo of the data cleaning tool formerly known as Google Refine)
• Overview Project | Read the getting started guide
• Scrape screen scraper Chrome extension. Journalist Jens Finnäs wrote a tutorial for it on Dataists.
• Time Flow by Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viegas
• Stately – a symbol font to create a map of the U.S. using HTML & CSS
• Weka 3: Data mining software in Java
• Cascading Tree Sheets
• Dataset (part of the Miso Project) – grabs data from Google Spreadsheets and helps visualize the data
• Datawrapper (open source)
• Google Chart Tools
• Infogram
• ManyEyes
• Tabletop.js
• Tableau Public (Windows only)
• Mapbox and Tilemill
• Statwing
• Adobe Edge Animate free tool for creating interactive content
• Spoofcard caller ID spoofing
• Trap Call unblocks private numbers
• Burner iPhone app creates disposable phone numbers
• Tools for hiding an IP address:
– Anonymizer ($80)
– Privoxy
– BeHidden
– Anonymous
– IxQuick
• Orbot provides Tor proxying on Android phones
• Silent Circle encrypted communication app for iPhone and Android
• Whois (search for domain name owners)
• SpiderOak private, secure data stored in the cloud
• Foller.me who to follow on social platforms
• Twazzup.com
• Ban.jo (mobile app)
• Hachi social platform search tool
• R Project for Statistical Computing
• R Studio
• Learn to unlock government data with Sunlight Academy offered by the Sunlight Foundation
• JS Console for debugging JavaScript
• Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 (4th edition): The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide
• Production code for Overview Server, which does visual document mining
• mitmproxy (“man in the middle” proxy) inspect and edit traffic flows on the fly. SSL compatible.
• Python Social Auth social authentication/registration mechanism
• XCode iPhone simulator
• jQuery Vertical Timeline by MinnPost
• Rubular regular expression editor for Ruby
• UltraEdit text editor (Windows only)
• Tom MacWright’s Mistakes interactive JS editor
• Sphinx open source search engine
• NPR’s App Template project template for client-side apps
• ILENE the polite coding language (from Jeff Larson)
• Django Bakery helps bake your Django site out as flat files
• Invar generates map tiles from a Mapnik configuration
• Table Capture Chrome extension grabs table HTML and drops it into a Google doc
• TableTools2 Firefox extension allows you to copy and manipulate table data from the Web
• Haystax point-and-click data collection
• Sisi Wei’s presentation framework
• Bank Tracker contains data on every FDIC bank
• Shpescape converts shape files to TopoJSON
• Numeric.js JavaScript library for numerical calculations
• Pixel Ping pixel tracker
• Helium Scraper extracts website data into structured formats such as CSV and XML
• Choose Your Own Adventure plug-in from Mother Jones
• Timeline JS
• The WNYC interactive Bingo card generator
• Proof Finder search email and other unstructured data (designed for lawyers and investigators)
• Paper of the Congressional Record (requires a key from Sunlight Labs)
• YUI, an open source JavaScript and CSS library for developing interactive applications
• Tarbell Google docs-driven CMS from the Chicago Tribune apps team (currently in alpha)
• Chase Davis’s FEC Standardizer code and explainer
• Al Shaw’s Dirtyword Ruby script cleans HTML from Word docs.
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
References
• Jeff Larson recommends “Eloquent JavaScript” as the best book for learning JS
• Mike Bostock’s d3.js tutorials (from Sharon Machlis)
• Scott Murray’s d3.js tutorials (from Sharon Machlis)
• How to select, create & remove elements in d3.js (from Jerome Cukier and Scott Murray)
• Computational Journalism syllabus from Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, Spring 2013 (from Jonathan Stray)
• Connected China from Fathom & Reuters (background)
– Notes on Connected China by Chris Amico
• How to Bulletproof Your Data (from Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica)
• Federal Reserve Economic Data (includes international data and an API; from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)
• Little Sis, a database of relationships between people in business and government
• OpenMissouri a collection of state and local government data from Missouri, some of which isn’t ordinarily made available online
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
• ProPublica’s News Apps Style Guide
• TheyRule shows the relationships between people in corporations
• Hadley Wickham’s academic paper on tidy data
• Hadley Wickham’s guide to using regular expressions in R
• ProPublica News Apps Desk Coding Manifesto
• ProPublica’s Principles of News App Design Structure
• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) data encryption
• Tor Project
• OpenElections Project, certified historical election results for everyone
• Open Innovation and open APIs in Digital Journalism (academic paper by Tanja Aitamurto and Seth C. Lewis)
• Chart of the differences between PHP, Python and Ruby
• How to build a stepper visualization
• How to install MySQL on Mac OS or Windows
• R for Journalists
• A journalists’ guide to verifying images
• Finding the Wisdom in the Crowd (on verifying images found on social platforms)
• How to visualize your backlinks with Google Fusion Tables (network visualization tutorial)
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Hospital Compare from Medicare.gov
• Winners of Kaggle’s campaign finance interactive reporting contest
• Working with Tabletop.js and Handlebars.js
• Impact of Responsive Designs
• Drew Conway’s Data Science Venn Diagram (now in d3.js!)
• How to Not Screw Up Your Data
• Did you watch Ben Welsh’s lightning talk? Here’s the presentation he credits for changing his life: Writing reusable code by James Bennett, now at Mozilla. Read the revamped slides
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References | Work Samples
Work Samples
• The Year in CAR presentation by Mark Horvit and Megan Luther, IRE
(7.1 MB PDF)
• The Year in CAR wrap by Ryan Graff, Knight Lab
• The Evolution of Sandy’s Path (Weather.com)
• Paralax Scrolling: James Bond (BBC)
• How the Chicago Tribune News Apps team made the Chicago Crime site
• Chinese Chemicals Flow Unchecked Onto World Drug Market (The New York Times)
• Income Inequality in America (Reuters)
• Australians who don’t pay tax: what would Romney say? (Financial Review)
• Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (Financial Review)
• Workout at Work (Washington Post)
• Ad Libs (PBS Newshour)
• Could you be an Olympic medalist (from The Guardian)
• Fake medical providers slip through Medicare loophole (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
• Medicare fraudsters used UPS boxes to fleece millions from taxpayers (Dayton Daily News)
• The Killing Roads 10 years of traffic accidents in Norway (bt.no)
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