The short link to this list is j.mp/nicar15 (case sensitive).

Consider donating to IRE
This is the fifth anniversary of my NICAR Links List! If you’ve found the lists helpful, consider donating some money to IRE to help them continue training people and bringing NICAR to you. Donate today. You know you want to.

And now, on to business…
It’s back! The annual collection of presentations, tutorials, and resources from IRE’s CAR conference. This year’s event comes to you from Atlanta, March 5 – 8. Keep up with the chatter on Twitter at #NICAR15.

For attendees, IRE has created an schedule in The Guidebook app (iOS, Android & Web). Very helpful for planning the tactical mission known as “managing your time.”

Jeremy Singer-Vine also created CSV & JSON outputs of the schedule, along with the Python scraper to DIY. And there’s a Google spreadsheet with all the sessions. Awesome.

If you’re presenting at NICAR and would like this list to include your resource (presentation, tutorial repo, etc.), please send it using this form, or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva.

If you’re looking for a job, IRE keeps a list of open positions as does Knight-Mozilla OpenNews at Source Jobs. If you’re specifically interested in data visualization jobs, look here.

And finally, NICAR in the Peach State will see its first California Code Rush. The Golden State’s campaign finance and lobbying database is online, and the California Code Rush aims to make the data easier to download, review and republish. It’s an open source project with lots of opportunities to help.

For previous years’ tutorials, videos, presentations and tips see the lists from 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011.

Jump to
Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples

Presentations & Tutorials

• Excel Magic tutorial | data (from MaryJo Webster)
• Creating your first Django admin (from Ben Welsh & Ken Schwencke)
• Write your first news app (from Ben Welsh)
• Solo data journalist tips and tools (from Brent Jones)
• Critical questions to ask of studies, press releases and scientific reports (from Peter Aldhous)
• Analyzing networks with Gephi (from Peter Aldhous)
• Make your own data bot with Spark Core, IFTTT and Google Spreadsheets (from Matt Waite)
• Transforming Data: Using abstraction to gain knowledge from numbers (from Rob Simmon, ~25MB PDF)
• How The New York Times analyzed oil spills in North Dakota, and how you can apply the same techniques (from Robert Gebeloff, PowerPoint file)
• Secrets of Covering Money slides (from Brandon Quester’s Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism pre-conference session)
• Making every story a data story (from Eva Constantaras)
• Cleaner Data: Do it once and only once (And only once) (from David Eads)
• Do it once (hopefully): Aspirational data processing (from Derek Willis)
• Write an app in Sinatra — Simple web apps with Ruby (from Jacob Harris)
• Data from scratch (from Griff Palmer, Ricardo Brom & Lisa Pickoff-White)
• Tracking diseases (from Daniel Lathrop)
• Detecting racial disparities in your town (from David Herzog)
• Uncovering Racial and Economic Divides Using Data (from Nicole Hannah-Jones)
• Mapping Section 8 (from Tim Henderson)
• What the hell is R? (from @TishaOnTV)
• First steps with R (from Annie Waldman)
• Key data for investigating universities (from Anu Narayanaswamy, Sandhya Kambhampati & Todd Wallack)
• From words to pictures – text analysis & data visualization (from Nick Diakopoulos, PowerPoint file)
• Make every international story a data story (from Giannina Segnini)
• Analyzing job promises (from Tyler Dukes)
• 2015 reporter’s guide to analyzing BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data PDF | PowerPoint (from David Hiles)
• Analyzing jobs in your community tipsheet (from MaryJo Webster)
• Storytelling from space speaker slides compilation PDF includes the two links below. (from Brian T. Jacobs)
• Storytelling from space: Tools and resources (from Brian T. Jacobs)
• Storytelling from space: Case study: Losing Ground (from Al Shaw)
• Storytelling from space: Repo of additional slides to study (from Brian T. Jacobs)
• Getting started with Twitter Bootstrap Gist tutorial | Slides (from Erika Lee)
• How to download data without scraping (from Michelle Minkoff & Scott Klein
• The new ecosystem of health data (from Charles Ornstein)
• Intro to D3 (Darla Cameron & Alex Bordens)
• How to humanize data visualizations (from Katie Park)
• nullCTRL: Let’s find the open and unsecured (from Espen Sandli)
• Investigating businesses with data (from Andrea Fuller)
• Teach yourself to code (from Becca Aaronson)
• The beginner’s guide to taking control of the command line (from Chris L. Keller)
• Intro to Python (from Jackie Kazil)
• Covering the Affordable Care Act tipsheet | PowerPoint slides (from Meghan Hoyer)
• Watchdogging public spending (from Joanna Lin)
• Watchdogging public spending (from Mike Macaig)
• Machine learning in the wild (from Steven Rich)
• Notes from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s salary advice discussion, “Let’s get real about pay” (from Katie Park)
• Useful command line tools for PC users (from Matt Kiefer)
• Playing with Arduino (from John Keefe)
• Advanced SQL using PostGresQL (from Anthony DeBarros)
• How to use Git & GitHub at the command line (from Jessica Lord & Anna Wiener)
• Free tools for scraping data and creating timelines/maps (from Juan A. Martinez)
• Django for data analysis (from Armand Emamdjomeh & Steven Rich)
• Visual journalism for tiny news desks (from Jaeah Lee)
• Building better maps with Mapbox, Leaflet and Javascript (from Ashlyn Still)
• Building mobile-ready visualizations and maps in minutes with Silk (from Alex Salkever)
• Ruby 1: Introduction (from Al Shaw)
• Ruby 3: Building web apps with Sinatra (from Jacob Harris)
• PDFs Unlocked (from Kevin Crowe & Miguel Barbosa)
• How to get data into Excel tipsheet and exercises (from Patti DiVincenzo)
• Mapping JS: Building narrative with geo data + CartoDB (from Aurelia Moser)
• The finer details of digital security, including 2-factor authentication and software verification tipsheet (from Harlo Holmes & Aurelia Moser)
• Command line tools and recipes (from Agustin Armendariz)
• Tools to automatically generate story leads Slides | Tipsheet (from Todd Wallack, Thomas Thoren & Abe Handler)
• Sixteen solutions for data-driven projects Slides | Example code | Notes (from Christopher Groskopf)
• Make photoshop work for you (from Chris Canipe)
• Let’s build a map with TileMill, Mapbox Studio & the Mapbox/Leaflet API Slides | GitHub repo (From Sarah Frostenson)
• CAR on the beat tipsheet (from Jennifer Smith Richards, Christopher Weaver, Kate Martin)
• Hands on with machine learning (from Chase Davis)
• Create interactive news games without much coding (from Rebekah Monson)
• Making data-informed design decisions (from Tyler Fisher & Josh Kadis)
• Catching fire: Spreading data journalism through the newsroom (from Emma Carew Grovum)
• Organize your newsroom around data (from Jeff Ernsthausen)
• Making timelines (from Lena Groeger)
• Introduction to data science (from Tom Meagher & Travis Swicegood)
• Web scraping using Python Slides | Solutions (from Paul Schreiber)
• Lightning-fast data analysis in Tableau Handout 1 | Handout II | Data folder (from Sarah Ryley)
• What we talk about when we talk about “data smells” Notes (from Jacob Harris, Aurelia Moser & Chris Keller)
• Design for data journalism: What to do and what not to do (from Moiz Syed)
• Let’s make an animated GIF (from Lena Groeger)
• Let’s make an animated GIF, taxidermy edition (from Lena Groeger)
• Tools for cracking PDFs Slides and data files (from Danielle Cervantes)
• Dedupe, or what to do in a world without unique IDs (from Jeff Ernsthausen & Forest Gregg)
• Deep dives into Occupy (from Cédric Sam)
• Getting it the rightest you can (from Thomas Hargrove, Jennifer LaFleur, John Perry & Janet Roberts)
• PyCar: Python mini bootcamp tutorial (from Heather Billings, Chris Keller, Tom Meagher, Ryan Murphy, Katie Park, Eric Sagara & Kevin Schaul)
• Python Intermediate bootcamp (from Jeremy Bowers, Michael Corey & Serdar Tumgoren)
• Intermediate/Advanced Python: Tutorial | GitHub repo (from Jeremy Bowers & Serdar Tumgoren)
• Advanced Python workshop Slides | workshop repo (from Geoff Hing)
• Invitation via GitHub Issues to improve how PyCar is taught (from Tom Meagher)
• Data cleaning with regular expressions (from Christian McDonald)
• Visualization for reporting slides | tipsheet (from Coulter Jones & Michelle Minkoff)
• Introduction to mapping: Making maps with QGIS (from Peter Aldhous)
• Mapping 2: Manipulating and editing geographic data with QGIS (from Michael Corey)
• Intro to JavaScript slides | GitHub repo (from Andy Boyle)
• Useful new data visualization and analysis packages in R tutorial | data repo (from Sharon Machlis)
• Sensor journalism: Buzz or BS — Travis Hartman’s civic sound detection in Columbia, MO slides | Matt Waite’s building a luggage detector slides
• Wrangling federal campaign finance data in a ‘real’ newsroom (from Jacob Fenton)
• So they bought a federal candidate, now what? tipsheet (from Sarah Bryner)
• It’s not about the FEC: other campfin data (from Jacob Fenton)
• Finding and Analyzing Data on FEC.gov (from Christopher Schnaars)
• Visualizing your data with R and ggplot2 (from Ron Campbell)
• 50 ideas in 60 minutes (from Tyler Dukes and Mc Nelly Torres)
• TechRaking 10: Bootstrapping the news (from Michael Corey, Jennifer LaFleur, Emmanuel Martinez, Eric Segara, Nathan Shobe, Julia Smith and Aaron Williams)
• Using data to detect environmental dangers (from Michael Corey)
• Municipal bonds 101: How to find, understand and analyze bond offering statements (from Cezary Podkul)
• Using the web inspector for complex scraping slides | GitHub repo (from Eric Segara)
• Advanced SQL in MySQL tutorial (from Liz Lucas)
• Data Alchemy workshop: get usable, analyzable data out of what would otherwise be considered junk (or a headache) (from Jeremy Merrill)
• Policing the Police handouts (from Rob Barry, Ben Poston, Topher Sanders and Corey Johnson)
• Color (and shape and place) my world a.k.a. “Elegant Mapping” slides | Keynote file (from Rob Simmon)

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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples

Software & Tools

• Tarbell – Google spreadsheets-based website publishing tool
• Landsat-ul: A utility to search, download and process Landsat 8 satellite imagery
• JPL’s SMAP Viewer (SMAP is “Soil Moisture Active Passive” satellite imaging)
• Plotly – graph and share your data
• Plug Tableau into Excel with Tableau’s Reshaper
• Bokeh Python interactive visualization library
• markdowneyjr turns Markdown into JSON for slightly easier copyediting of data files
• Changedetection.com tracks website page changes and notifies you.
• The New York Times graphics desk’s ai2html changes Adobe Illustrator files into HTML & CSS | example output
• The New York Times graphics desk’s ArchieML – a structured text format optimized for human writability
• Minezy email exploration tool (prototype by T. Christian Miller)
• TimelineCurator works with TimelineJS to extract temporal references in freeform text to generate a visual timeline
• The Upshot’s Bedfellows command-line tool for exploring the PAC donor-recipient relationship

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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples

References & Other Resources from NICARians

• MaryJo Webster’s data journalism training materials
• Jeremy Singer-Vine’s CSV & JSON outputs of the NICAR15 schedule
• Sharon Machlis’s Learn R for Beginners intensive intro
• CSVkit documentation for data extraction from .csv files
• “Machine Learning: a Probabilistic Perspective” (math-intensive university textbook; table of contents is good map of the space of machine learning)
• Trend in computer-assisted reporting article from Editor & Publisher
• NASA’s How To Make a True-Color Landsat 8 Image
• How to process Landsat 8 images in Photoshop
• ArcGIS open data sets
• “How spreadsheets changed the world“
• Data you need for broadcast quick hits: Bureau of Transportation statistics | Aviation accident database & synopses | Uniform crime reporting statistics
• Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data (PDF)
• If the moon were only 1 pixel
• What is the difference between `grep`, `egrep`, and `fgrep`?
• Multivariate testing: what works and doesn’t in interactives
• Mike Bostock’s OpenVis Conference keynote, “Design is a search problem“
• DocGraph’s Open Provider Directory and Open Formulary comment data
• How to fix Gephi on Mac OS X
• Matt Ericson’s When maps shouldn’t be maps
• Geomancer.io – Add geographically-related data to any spreadsheet.
• Introduction to machine learning with Python in Scikit-Learn
• NPR Visuals best practices
• How to use PGP on Windows PC
• PythonJournos listserv

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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples

Lighting Talks

• Images from Space — introducing schooner-tk (from Jeff Larson)
• 10 things I hate about you, well sorta — getting designers & developers to work together (from Lily Mihalik & Anthony Pesce)
• 5 data visualizations in 5 minutes: each in 5 lines or less of R (from Sharon Machlis)
• The five stages of terrible data (from Steven Rich)
• How do blind people see? Slides | Speaker notes (from Suyeon Son)
• Stop letting the ~cool~ factor detract from your journalism (from Ashlyn Still)
• Wrestling data (without coding) (from MaryJo Webster)
• The end of maps, in seven charts (from Darla Cameron)
• Seven features you’ll want in your next charting tool (from Gregor Aisch)
• Stop trying to multitask. You’re terrible at it. (from Chris Canipe)

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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples

Work Samples

• “Here’s Where You Should Live to Find Your Perfect Match – Time
• “Colors – RadioLab’s representation of color in audio

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Presentations & Tutorials | Software & Tools | References & Additional Resources | Lightning Talks | Work Samples