The short link to this list is j.mp/nicar18-list (case sensitive).
For previous years’ tutorials, videos, presentations and tips see the lists from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011.
If you’re hosting a session, send me a link + your session name via Twitter @MacDiva or via the comments box below.
Brent A. Jones has compiled a list of notes from the NICAR sessions he attended. They’re well worth reading, especially since he covers some “Conversations” sessions that didn’t have slides.
And finally, if were at the conference and saw people wearing a sticker that looks like ☚ this, know that they’re unofficial NICAR ambassadors.
NICAR has grown very big over the years and sticker-wearers are some of the people I’ve met who want to keep NICAR feeling welcoming and inclusive. If you’re stuck for a conversation opener, say hi, introduce yourself, and ask them what they’re most excited to learn about. And if it’s your first conference, say so!
So now… on to the learning…
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples
Presentations & Tutorials
- JavaScript I, II & III hands-on GitHub repo (from Annie Daniel, Ashlyn Still, Carla Astudillo & Erin Petenko)
- First Python Notebook: Rapid data analysis in the newsroom tutorial (from Ben Welsh, James Gordon & Cheryl Phillips)
- Csvkit, a command-line tool for reporters Github repo (from Christian McDonald)
- Stats in Excel handout & datafile (from Norm Lewis)
- Tips for harnessing new IRS 990 data slides & tipsheet (from Andrea Fuller & Todd Wallack)
- Accessing Amazon’s IRS Form 990 public data tipsheet (from Michele Tranquilli)
- Exploring data on the command line with VisiData tutorial (from Jeremy Singer-Vine)
- How and why to make your data analysis reproducible — BuzzFeedNews GitHub repo from Jeremy Singer-Vine | further reading from Hannah Cushman
- PyCAR Python mini boot camp slides | GitHub repo (from Tom Meagher)
- Intro to R GitHub repo | tutorial | tipsheet (from Ron Campbell)
- Setting up a reproducible data analysis workflow in R GitHub repo and tutorial (from Andrew Tran)
- Time, location and context: Analyzing and presenting location-based/geographic data panelist tipsheet (from Amy Schmitz Weiss)
- Exploring the tidyverse GitHub repo & tutorial (from Hadley Wickham)
- Introduction to R and RStudio Hands-On GitHub repo & tutorial (from Sharon Machlis)
- Getting started with machine learning for reporting panel slides & code (from Rachel Shorey, Anthony J. Pesce, Chase Davis & Peter Aldhous)
- R, RStudio, and the tidyverse for data analysis tutorial (from Peter Aldhous)
- Data Journalism that Breaks the Filter Bubble. preso 1 | preso 2 | tipsheet (from Eva Constantaras & Adriana Gallardo)
- Back of the Napkin Regex slides | cheatsheet (from Amanda Hickman)
- IPUMS and microdata slides (ZIP file will download) (from Rob Gebeloff)
- GitHub for Journalists slides (from Max Harlow)
- Covering opioids with data outline | tipsheet (from Charles Ornstein)
- Datakit: A toolkit for data projects slides | GitHub repo (from Angeliki Kastanis & Serdar Tumgoren)
- Recycling Data+Viz+Code slides (from Rachel Alexander, Jayme Fraser & Kai Teoh)
- Scraping Without Programming slides (from Samantha Sunne & Mike Stucka)
- How to scrape with simple programming (using Google Apps Script) slides (from Samantha Sunne)
- Data visualization in the upside down preso, maps & dataviz (from Martin Stabe, Kennedy Elliott, Daniele Palumbo & Armand Emamdjomeh)
- Maps made easy demo & tipsheet (from Derek Eder & Regina Compton)
- Unleash the data: Tools and tricks for taming PDFs slides (from Chad Day)
- Which chart should I use, and why? Information design for the human brain! slides (from Darla Cameron & Anna Flagg)
- What the Hell is D3? R? VR? DVR? slides (from Liz Lucas & Jill Riepenhoff)
- Using OpenCorporates to investigate companies tipsheet (from Mollie Hanley)
- Deep dives for radio and podcasts tipsheet (from Jon Collins)
- Beyond Signal: Secure messaging channels & confidential tip pages slides (from Martin Shelton)
- Education civil rights data: The good, the bad, the dirty slides (from Jennifer LaFleur)
- Conversaton: Data Blitz – Jon Muyskens’s slides | Sean McMinn’s House Disbursement Data! slides
- The Only One in the Newsroom slides & tipsheet (from Tim Broderick & Lisa Pickoff-White)
- All Charts Lie, Some Lie More Than Others slides & notes (from Alberto Cairo)
- Early Career Straight-Talk Session notes | Tipsheet (from Aditi Bhandari & Madi Alexander)
- Stats 1: An Introduction (using PSPP) tutorial | data file (from Holly Hacker)
- Accountability reporting for Native American communities tipsheet (from Mary Hudetz)
- Finding People With Data tipsheet (from Michael J. Behrens)
- Wielding data to investigate police misconduct tipsheet (from MaryJo Webster)
- Linear Regression slides (from Jeff Lowenstein)
- Advanced SQL slides (from Jennifer Peebles)
- Digging through the Web tipsheet (from Gary Price)
- Wagging the Dog slides (PowerPoint .zip) | tipsheet (from Christopher Schnaars)
- Uncovering Inequity in Property Taxes slides (from Matt Clark)
- Evolving Forms and the Future of Live Coverage slides (from Tiff Fehr)
- Introduction to Python GitHub repo (from Nausheen Husain & Cecelia Reyes)
- Inside the sausage factory: An inside look at government data making tipsheet (from Rebecca Williams)
- Finding Data to Cover College Athletics tipsheet & slides (PowerPoint .zip) (from Christopher Schnaars)
- Investigating College Sports slides (from Jodi Upton)
- Searchable, interactive data tables in an hour GitHub repo (from Saurabh Datar)
- Usability Testing in the Newsroom slides & tipsheet (from Clarisa Diaz)
- Google Tools for Data Journalism slides (from Marco Túlio Pires)
- Bring your investigative reporting to life using animation and comics slides (from Hilke Schellmann, Susie Cagle & Ranjani Chakraborty)
- Beginning D3 slides (from Darla Cameron)
- Intermediate D3 workshop GitHub repo (from John Muyskens)
- How to find stories in data through visualization: Rachel Tatman’s tutorial | Alberto Cairo’s slides
- Python 1: The Fundamentals tutorial (from Michelle Minkoff)
- 30 Tools in 60 Minutes slides | tools list & crowdsourced list (from Jeremy Caplan)
- Probing addiction treatment during an opioid epidemic tipsheet (from Teri Sforza)
- Building and telling a bulletproof data story tipsheet (from Tisha Thompson & Sandhya Kambhampati)
- How journalists can detect electronic surveillance tipsheet (from Jorge Luis Sierra)
- Intro to Digital Security handout (from Martin Shelton)
- Setting up a reproducible data analysis workflow in R tutorial (from Andrew Ba Tran)
- The congressional data you don’t use but should slides (from Carrie Levine)
- The congressional data you don’t use tipsheet (from Derek Willis)
- Finding the story: Election administration tipsheet (from Derek Willis)
- L.A. Times Map Maker GitHub repo (from Jon Schleuss)
- Finding needles in haystacks with fuzzy matching slides (from Max Harlow)
- How to Find Reporting Leads and Publishable Facts in The Text Data You Already Have slides | Text data visualization, story examples (from Jeff Ernsthausen, Jeremy Merrill & Youyou Zhou)
- Data of disasters: Following the money slides (from Matt Dempsey)
- Data reporting on the criminal justice beat slides (from Alysia Santo)
- Mining the Social Web slides & scripts (from Lam Thuy Vo)
- Level Up Your Python class notes (from Serdar Tumgoren)
- I’m entitled to a spreadsheet, dang it! Requesting health & education data slides | tipsheet (from Sarah Ryley, Steven Rich & Annie Waldman)
- Python 3 GitHub repo (from Geoff Hing)
- R: Collecting and Analyzing Twitter Data slides (from Michael W. Kearney)
- Creating a data culture that lasts slides (from Tom Meagher, Annie Daniel & Mark Nichols)
- Shoot us straight: Using data and documents to report on guns slides | tipsheet (from Nick Penzenstadler, Kim Smith and Matt Drange)
- Conversation: Journalism Educators’ Roundtable notes (from Mindy McAdams)
- Collaboration and Collaboratives notes (from Mago Torres & Forest Gregg)
- Intro to Machine Learning tipsheet (from Forest Gregg)
- Quick-Turn Data Stories slides (from David Sheingold, Francisco Vara-Orta, Greta Kaul & Nicole Vap)
- Reusable Charts in D3 GitHub Repo (from Sarah E. Frostenson & Jeremy C.F. Lin)
- Reactive Frameworks Without Fear GitHub repo (from Jon McClure and Tyler Fisher)
- Sensor Journalism: How do we do it and what are the limits? slides (from Marianne Bouchart, Kelly Calagna, Denise Lu & Michael Corey)
- Using data and records to investigate voting slides | tipsheet | paywalled tipsheet (from Jessica Huseman, Doug Moore & Ryan Thornburg)
- OpenRefine for cleaning data tutorial repo (from Sarah Ryley)
- PostgreSQL Hands-On GitHub repo (from Anthony DeBarros)
- Your First Graphics App (using NodeJS) tutorial (from Ben Welsh)
- Creating your first satellite image tutorial (from David Yanofsky)
- Design for Non-Designers slides (from Angelica McKinley & Lena Groeger)
- Tracking Trump’s Conflicts of Interest slides (from Alexander Howard & Hilary Niles)
- This is Not a List: Reporting with data for business and economics slides (from Sarah Cohen)
- Methods and Resources to Find Relevant Cross-Border Data for your Reporting slides (from Pinar Dağ)
- Toxic City: Uncovering environmental hazards faced by urban children tipsheet (from Dylan Purcell)
- Statistics with R slides & R script (from Steve Reilly)
- Reverse-Engineering Algorithms slides (from Rob Arthur)
- Five Reasons Why Algorithmic Accountability is Hard slides (from Nick Diakopoulos)
- The College Scorecard: Why we have it and why you should care slides (from Andrew Kreighbaum)
- Diversity in the newsroom: Tips on hiring and retaining a diverse workforce slides | tipsheet (from Yolanda Martinez, Tracie Powell, Mark J. Rochester & Mizell Stewart III)
- Learn from Our Fails tipsheet (from Maggie Lee)
- Putting your town under a microscope — and keeping it there tipsheet (from Kate Howard, Matt Kiefer & John Diedrich)
- Who’s Who and What’s Real on Social Media slides | Finding key sources tipsheet | Hacking Facebook searches tipsheet (from Molly Young)
- QGIS I tutorial (from Christine Jeavans & John Walton)
- Safe Searching slides (from Margot Williams)
- Risky Research slides (from Neena Kapur)
- The seduction, power and danger of using data to investigate the criminal justice system slides (from Michael Braga)
- Finding the Story: Immigration data tipsheet (from Angilee Shah)
- Beyond 1M rows: Using and joining large datasets in Excel demo & tipsheet (.zip folder) (from Microsoft)
- After FactFinder: Navigating data.census.gov tipsheet (from Ron Campbell)
- Working With Criminal Justice Data slides (from Joe Mahr)
- Command Line for Reporters slides (from AJ Vicens)
- Investigating Immigration slides (from Maria Zamudio, Sarah Macaraeg, Pam Dempsey & Reade Levinson)
- Gathering and cleaning data in R GitHub repo (from Caelainn Barr)
- How the Internet Works slides (from Melissa Lewis)
- Beyond The “Nerd Box”: How to explain methodology better tipsheet (from Evie Liu, Jeff South & Stephen Stirling)
- Digital Mindset for Storytelling slides (from Rich Gordon)
- Infographics and Dataviz as non traditional ways to tell entertainment news stories digitally slides (from Amaya Verde)
- Demographics Beyond the Census slides | tipsheet (from D’Vera Cohn)
- Beyond Census: 10 Alternative Demographics Sources in 10 minutes slides (from Tim Henderson)
- Beyond Census slides (from Paul Overberg)
- How to Avoid Rookie Data Mistakes slides | tipsheet (from Alex Richards, Kristin Hussey & Mike Stucka)
- Creating an interactive map with Leaflet.js slides | GitHub repo (from Lucio Villa)
- Tools Journalists Use Install Party guide (from Andrea Suozzo, Cody Winchester & Alex Richards)
- Finding International Data: Where to Look in Africa slides (from Nana Boakye-Yiadom)
- No passport needed: Finding relevant international data slides (from Giannina Segnini)
- R: Machine Learning and Data Models tutorial (open in RStudio or save as an .html file and open in a browser) | GitHub repo (from Mary Ryan)
- Finding your target in the money laundering capital of the world slides (from Leila Haddou)
- Collaboration with scientists and academics as a reporting tool:
– Lessons from scientists and academics slides (from Sinduja Rangarajan)
– The Stanford Open Policing Project slides (from Sharad Goel) - How emerging technologies can aid your storytelling slides (from Sanette Tanaka Sloan)
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples
Software & Tools
- RiveScript – for building chatbots
- Regex 101 for testing regular expressions
- Rubular for testing regular expressions with a Ruby interpreter
- All My Tweets
- SensorGrid API and Dashboard
- Postman for API development
- ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer
- Google Cloud Dataprep
- Politico’s django-slackchat-serializer docs & GitHub repo
- City Bureau Documenters intro & City Scrapers GitHub repo
- Michele Tranquilli’s IRS990 XML Tools GitHub repo
- RStudio
- Jupyter Notebook
- Observable
- OpenRefine
- MuckRock
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
- FOIA Mapper
- Otter – AI transcription of voice conversations
- Tetra – AI transcription of calls
- The Noun Project – royalty-free icons
- OpenElections – certified U.S. election results
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples
References & Other Resources from NICARians
- Tidyverse style guide
- Itération de fonctions avec purrr en français
- strings et expressions régulières en français with a visual guide in English
- New US FOIA portal announcement | site | data
- Are You Falling Victim To Spurious Correlations? (Here’s How To Stop)
- Calculate poll odds GitHub repo
- Matt Stiles’s Data Repo
- The Quartz Guide to Bad Data
- MaryJo Webster’s Data Journalism Training Materials
- RStudio’s Cheat Sheets
- The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions: Finding Patterns in Everyday Text by Dan Nguyen
- The 2017 News Nerd Survey
- ITDashboard.gov data about U.S. government technology spending
- Oversight.gov U.S. Federal Inspectors General reports
- Jeremy Singer-Vine’s Data Is Plural newsletter
- Sophie Warnes’s Fair Warning newsletter
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
- Investigator’s Guide to “Voter Fraud” from the Brennan Center for Justice
- Samantha Sunne’s Tools for Reporters newsletter
- Shields Up: Get Your Malware Shots — How reporters can prepare for malicious software
- Financial Times Visual Vocabulary with posters available in English, 日本语 , 繁体中文 & 简体中文
- Regular Expressions Cookbook
- ProPublica’s Documenting Hate database
- WTF Visualizations viz.WTF
- UK Companies House People with significant control (PSC) data snapshot
- HM Land Registry data (UK)
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples
Lightning Talks
- Good Copy Editors Make Good Data Journalists — Justin Myers
- We Need More Career Paths for News Nerds slides | transcript – Matt Dempsey
- I designed and built a dining room table; here’s what it taught me about data — Steven Rich
- HELLO WORLD: How the English language failed international data journalism — Jonathan Soma
- Real Talk: Alcohol & Journalism slides | brainstorming notes — Rachel Alexander
- Sensor Journalism in the Age of Trump’s Era — Kelly Calagna
- Immigrants working in the news industry — Kai Teoh
- The News Nerd Guide to Forming a Union — Jon Schleuss & Anthony Pesce
- I can’t believe it’s not georeferenced! — Denise Lu & Armand Emamdjomeh
- Hope for the best, prepare for the worst — Kate Howard & Alexandra Kanik
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples
Work Samples
- Philip Meyer Journalism Awards official page & Wikipedia page
- Local News Innovation Showcase
- The Year in CAR presentation
- Killings of Black Men by Whites are Far More Likely to be Ruled “Justifiable” – The Marshall Project
- Alle 2559 Direktkandidaten – Wer sie sind, wofür sie stehen – Berliner Morgenpost
- To keep crops from rotting in the field, farmers say they need Trump to let in more temporary workers – The Los Angeles Times
- LAPD underreported serious assaults, skewing crime stats for 8 years – The Los Angeles Times
- Walking While Black – ProPublica
- Trump Groups Raised Millions, Then Paid It Out to Loyalists and a Trump Hotel – The New York Times
- Travel the path of the solar eclipse — The Washington Post
- An Update On ‘The Pope’s Long Con’ — Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting
- Hundreds of People Made Gifts of Stock With Great Timing — The Wall Street Journal
- We can draw school zones to make classrooms less segregated. This is how well your district does. — Vox
- This is the story of how district leaders turned five once-average schools into Failure Factories. — Tampa Bay Times
- Death Behind Bars — Reno Gazette Journal
- Rehab Riviera: Addiction advertising can trick you to death — The Orange County Register
- Lost Mothers — ProPublica
- Top-Level Figure Skating Judges Consistently Favor Skaters From Their Home Countries. Now Many Of Those Judges Are At The Olympics. — BuzzFeed
- Why The 1992 Loop Flood Is The Most Chicago Story Ever — WBEZ
- One person, one vote? Absentee votes determine election in Missouri (IRE members only)
- Measuring the Toll of the Opioid Epidemic Is Tougher Than it Seems – ProPublica
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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples
Did you share something at NICAR? Request an addition to this list by sending me your session name and a link to your materials.
I welcome contributions from the IRE & NICAR communities. I also reserve the right to not publish material deemed inappropriate or irrelevant to the NICAR18 proceedings. My house, my rules.
