• Intro to Python, Session 1 tutorial and Python tipsheet (from Jacqueline Kazil and Serdar Tumgoren)

• Getting into a data-oriented mindset (from Mary Jo Webster and Wendell Cochran)

• Dataviz for beginners (from Matt Stiles and Sanjay Bhatt)

• MGRS Explained (from Jacob Harris)

• Data Visualization with JavaScript and HTML5 (from Jeff Larson)

• Tutorial: Census Data with Tableau Public

• PostGIS is Your New Bicycle – be wowed by a free alternative to costly desktop GIS (from Mike Corey and Ben Welsh)

Software & Tools

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• 3Scale – API management and monetization tool (free trial)
• API Playground – try APIs, no coding skills necessary
• Backbone.js adds a models-collections-views structure to JavaScript applications
• BatchGeo interactive map maker
• Biznar.com – business search engine
• CanIUse.com browser compatibility tables
• Census Block Conversions API
• ChangeTracker from ProPublica – track changes to any website
• ChinaVitae – learn who’s who in power in China
• CollegeInsight – compare universities by cost, financial aid, diversity, job placement rate
• DataWrangler cleans and transforms data
• Download manager downTHEMall is a FireFox extension that grabs webpage links and images.
• Europe Media Monitor’s NewsBrief – an international alternative to Google News
• EUROCONTROL – “find blocked private planes that might have flown to Europe, for example: see which executives are going to Cannes”
• FCC Census Block Conversions API – boundary service API, excellent for mapping
• The FireShot FireFox extension creates browser screenshots, adds annotation and more.
• Foreign Labor Certification Data Center – find what visas a company has applied for (there may be wage information tied to the application)
• Get Lat Lon – finds latitude and longitude for any location worldwide
• Free Google Drawings wireframe templates
• Google Fusion Tables for data analysis and visualization
• Google Refine for data cleaning
• Inmarsat Ships Directory – lookup a ship’s phone number
• JSFiddle online JavaScript editor
• Jigsaw: “Visual analytics for exploring and understanding document collections”
• Little Sis – visualizing the networks of social, financial and political power
• MarineTraffic.com – track vessels in real time
• Mayan open source, Django-based document manager
• Mr. Data Converter converts Excel data into web-friendly formats
• Needlebase
• NETROnline – public records search, especially good for real property lookups
• NodeXL uses Excel for network analysis
• NodeXL Teaching lessons and tutorials
• Numberway.com – lookup phone numbers around the world
• Outwit Hub – FireFox plugin for scraping websites
• PDFonFly – converts web pages to PDFs
• PhraseNet diagrams relationships between words in text
• PostGIS – adds mapping ability to PostgreSQL
• PrivacyChoice – rates website privacy policies
• Protovis
• PySAL an open source Python library for spatial analysis functions
• R statistical analysis software
R libraries recommended by Amanda Cox, Jeff Larson and others: ggplot, RColorBrewer (color picker), rgdal (bindings for GDAL – the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library), survival (survival analysis)
• Recorded Future – temporal analysis search engine uses predictive analytics to discover the likelihood of events in the future
• RSRuby – use the R environment in your Ruby program
• Rubular – test your regex on the fly
• Simile Timeline
• Scraper Wiki
• Snitch.Name – people lookup
• Tableau Public
• TimeFlow
• TinEye finds information on uploaded images, including usage, higher resolutions, modified versions
• Tweeql access the Twitter API by using SQL syntax (requires Python)
• TwitInfo chart Twitter keyword frequency and sentiment
• USA Spending – see what the US government is spending money on
 

References

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• NEW Journalists learning Python Google group
• NICAR ‘Net Tour – an index of links from IRE for watchdog research and learning computer-assisted reporting
• The New Precision Journalism (from Philip Meyer)
• The Logic Of Causal Order by James A. Davis (recommended by Philip Meyer)
• US Government Health Data
• Health Indicators Warehouse
• Coordinate Systems Overview for mapping
• Concepts of Probability (statistics!)
• Advanced Probability and Statistics, 2nd Ed. by the CK-12 Foundation
• Thomas Lumley: work page (statistics! and Amanda Cox’s professor)
• Hadley Wickham (statistics! and the maker of ggplot for R)
• Graphical Inference for Infovis by Hadley Wickham, Dianne Cook, Heike Hofmann and Andreas Buja (“How do we know if what we see (in a data visualization) is really there?”)
• “Be Careful What You Do With That Cell Phone Recording; It Could Land You in Jail” (from DB Smallman)
• Gary’s Social Media Count – see the volume of social media activity
• Quantitative Discovery from Qualitative Information: A General-Purpose Document Clustering Methodology by Gary King
• Producing Online News: Digital Skills, Stronger Stories by Ryan Thornburg
• US State Department Foreign Affairs Manual, section on information security, a.k.a. 12 FAM 500
• Five Databases in 50 Minutes: Government Session (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• News Apps: What Works and Why (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• Analysis-ready census data (from USA Today, available to NICAR members only)
• A directory of statistics bureaus by country (from Statistics Sweden)
• Data Visualization for Beginners (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• Tracking the Economy and Business (from the CAR2011 conference blog)
• Benford’s Law (statistics!)

Work Samples

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• The Wall Street Journal investigative report, “Confidentiality Cloaks Medicare Abuse” with database created by Mo Tamman
• The Center for Public Integrity investigative report, “Unproven for Older Women, Digital Mammography Saps Medicare Dollars”
• The Year in CAR
• Des Moines Register potholes map
• FlyOnTime.us – find the most on-time flights between cities (uses US government raw data)
• Employment Market Explorer – find out what the local employment market looks like. Compare local, regional and national rates and labor market dynamics. (uses US government raw data)
• WildTrack – using data to monitor endangered species populations
• Roundup of state-based 2010 census stories
• The Killing Roads – interactive map of highway accidents in Norway
• The entire King James Bible as a word tree
• Who Runs HK – network graph of the people in power in Hong Kong
• Research by Martin Wattenberg, including the highlighted works, Name Voyager, Map of the Markets, Shape of Song and Fleshmap