Meet with a book agent at this year's IRE Conference in San Antonio. Learn how to pitch your material and meet with a book agent to share your work during the designated time slot. What else shouldn't you miss at IRE 2013? The list is long. Check it out ...

Make your plans now to join us in San Antonio for the 2013 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference.

Check out the list of panels and sessions -- this isn't everything, just a sampling of what you'll be able to dig into when we gather from June 20-23.

Keynote speaker Marcela Turati will detail the dangers journalists face in Mexico. We'll showcase sports investigations with help from Deadspin, The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins and more. And in dozens of panels and hands-on sessions, you'll be armed with the tools, tips and strategies you need to ...

If you’re working from a Mac computer or getting into truly large datasets, Access may not be a viable option as a database manager. (It doesn’t work on Macs, and there are row limitations.) A good alternative is MySQL, an open-source database manager, which Alex Richards of the Chicago Tribune taught on Friday.

MySQL essentially installs a server that runs in the background on your computer. But if you don’t really understand what that means, don’t let it scare you. There are a handful of secondary applications that let you interface with MySQL in a way ...

After teaching a full day of data science during NewsCamp on Thursday, Hadley Wickham on Friday morning presented a brief introduction to data science called “Data science for the perplexed. For everyone.”

Wickham is an Assistant Professor at Rice University and working for RStudio. He describes himself as a statistician by training, and tried to offer some insight into the buzzword that is “data science.” 

He first cited the unofficial and often used description: “a blend of red bull-fueled hacking and espresso-inspired statistics." He also referenced this often-used venn diagram.

Data science isn’t just about hacking with big data ...

A CAR conference atendee throws a ball down the lane on Thursday night in Louisville. Photo by Travis Hartman, IRE/NICAR.

Stephanie Peuriere from Strasbourg University bowls at the after hours bowling event on Thursday night in Louisville. Photo by Travis Hartman, IRE/NICAR.

Google Fusion tables has a new look.

You can learn how to use it with Google Fusion Tables tutorials, and get a grip on how to import map data, and style, filter and share your creation with the world.

Learn step-by-step how to formulate “lots of points” maps, heat maps and intensity maps.

Some other cool tools: Fusion Tables Layer wizard to add custom layers, and shpescape to dump shapefile (like what you use in ArcGIS) into a Fusion table.

Geolocation tools help you search for social media activity buzzing in your beat, on your block and even in your building. The following tools help you search by geolocation information embedded in tweets, Facebook updates, youtube videos and more.

“Geolocation is one of the most exciting things for journalists out in the field,” presenter Doug Haddix said.

Some sweet tools:

• Ban.jo lets you see the exact location of updates and tweets – great for scaring your friends at cocktail parties.
• Mappeo is a YouTube geo-search, which allows you to see videos posted in a certain area. Search “Sandy near New ...

I walked into the Tableau Public session with absolutely no experience -- and within about 10 minutes the instructor had us open up some data, sort through a few of the elements, and create a visualization.  Its immediate ease of use is clear. To produce quick, coherent interactive charts seemed pretty easy.  The further we went along though; it became apparent that there was some serious horsepower under the hood.  And with great power comes responsibility.  More on this later.

Our instructor, Mike Klaczynski, started with the proper way to format data for Tableau, and in the ...

Start small, follow audit trails, and follow up. This session’s panelists offer advice, and underlying it all are those precepts, applicable to both your data skills and your investigative inquiry. The panel included Erin Jordan of The Gazette/KCRG-Cedar Rapids, Josh Sweigart of the Dayton Daily News (Cox Media Group), and Tim Eberly of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Start small

Tim Eberly started his multi-part series on daycare in Georgia after a two-year-old girl was found dead in a van, where she had been left on a hot day. Eberly describes himself as an investigative reporter who has come ...

FOIA Machine is a new open-source web platform to manage your open records requests. It’s aimed to help you get what you want from your request, avoid being ignored and appeal when you are denied.

"It’s aimed to help you get what you want from your request, avoid being ignored and appeal when you are denied", says Djordje Padejski, investigative journalist and founding director of the FOIA Machine.

“What we’re hoping to solve is this problem,” Coulter Jones of California Watch said, showing the room a picture of binders full of FOIA requests at the NICAR Database ...