By Jaimi Dowdell and Jennifer LaFleur
@jaimidowdell and @j_la28

In general, St. Louis is known for a few tasty (and not so tasty) food items: toasted ravioli, gooey butter cake, beer, other beer, Fitz’s root beer, freakishly sticky pizza cheese and Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. There's also plenty of fine dining, microbreweries and a slew of Italian restaurants in the neighborhood known as The Hill. If you're interested in eating your way through St. Louis while you're at the CAR Conference, look no further. We've put together a list of our favorite restaurants around St ...

Read more ...

There’s more than flowers and sunshine at the Missouri Botanical Gardens — there’s GIS and other technology that aids the gardens in research, maintenance, education and more. Come see how this technology is being put to use with a special (free) tour just for NICAR attendees Saturday, Feb. 25 at 10 a.m. Space is limited so you’ll need to sign up. As this is an off-site event, you’ll need to arrange for transportation (leave the hotel no later than 9:30 a.m.).

Contact Jennifer LaFleur for more details and to ...

Read more ...

The 2012 CAR Conference begins in just a few days.  Below are a few bits of information to help you prepare for this great conference!

 

For the latest up-to-date information about panels, speakers, and special events at the conference, please visit our conference pages.
 

Hotel Information
The conference is taking place at the St. Louis Union Station Marriott, One St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO 63103.

Registration
Registration opens Wednesday at 3pm and will be open Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the Atrium, located on the 2^ndfloor of the hotel’s conference center. 

Weather
It looks like ...

Read more ...

More than 100 panels, demos and hands-on training sessions will be offered at the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference. From the basics of data analysis using Excel and Access to editing a news app and mining unstructured text for stories, this year’s conference has panels for all skill levels of data journalists, as well as general panels for working with data on a variety of beats.

Early registration has ended, but on-site registration will be available Wednesday evening through Saturday. If this is your first conference, don’t be overwhelmed by the number of panels. The sessions are geared toward ...

Read more ...

Don't miss out as some of the best data journalists in the world come together for IRE's annual conference devoted to computer-assisted reporting. Pre-registration ends Monday, Feb. 13, at 5 p.m. (Central Standard Time). On-site registration is accepted, but the fee increases.

Register online before the deadline to reserve your space.

This year's conference, held at the St. Louis Union Station Marriott, offers dozens of hands-on training sessions for beginners to journalists on the cutting edge of digital reporting. In addition to the full schedule of training, this year's conference will feature a 12-hour "Liberate ...

Read more ...

Learn how to quickly visualize data and publish it interactively to the web without programming.

Tableau Public will host two, four-hour hands-on training sessions Thursday, Feb. 23, at the CAR Conference on how to use the free software to visualize data and post it online. The sessions will cover the basics of Tableau to create interactive data visualizations on short deadlines, as well as how to create more complex visualizations. 

Tableau for Beginners will cover:

• Connect to Excel files and other data
• Create maps and charts
• Format them beautifully
• Make them interactive

Tableau for Pros will cover:

• Clean and format ...

Read more ...

Developers will demo a beta version of the newsroom appliance at the 2012 CAR Conference.

Tucked away on reporters' computers are dozens of details that could benefit news coverage, if only other journalists knew where to look.

Newsrooms are swimming in data. Journalistic organizations big and small continue to collect data from local, state and federal governments, and dozens of other places. As the collection grows, making sense of that information can become more difficult.

That's what the PANDA project, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, wants to solve — make data analysis easier for journalists and make sharing ...

Read more ...

Tired of government agencies that care more about protecting their data than the public?

Frustrated by official websites that defiantly offer no easy way to download vital data sets?

It’s time to fight back.

Join IRE and Scraperwiki for a 12-hour data liberation marathon during the 2012 Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in St. Louis on Feb. 23-24.

We’re soliciting your nominations for data sets that you’re longing to crunch but haven’t been able to get your hands on. We’ll build a list of prime candidates for liberation. Then, on the opening evening of the CAR Conference ...

Read more ...

There are two things we know data journalists love: nerdy jokes and T-shirts.  When we asked for suggestions for a NICAR T-shirt to be sold at the 2012 CAR Conference in St. Louis, we didn't expect it there to be any shortage of ideas.

The first round of submissions are in, and they're pretty much what we expected: mostly groan-worthy, occasionally cryptic, and generally awesome. Check out what has been proposed so far by IRE members.

The contest is still open! We'll keep adding your suggestions as long as you keep sending them. Ideas can be submitted ...

Read more ...

While early-bird registration has ended, you have not missed your opportunity to attend this great training event.  On-site registrations will be accepted beginning Thursday, February 24 at 7:30 a.m. and will continue through Saturday during the conference, being held at the Raleigh Marriott City Center, 500 Fayetteville Street. View the schedule and expected speakers today!