Think of a data dashboard as a bird’s-eye view of data that gets automatically updated in real-time. It’s like a news app meant only for internal use, and the ultimate goal is to make repeat reporting processes more efficient. Aaron Bycoffe of The Huffington Post and Derek Williams and Jacob Harris of The New York Times explained this on Saturday.

Dashboards work best when reporters and developers collaborate to determine the information that would be most useful to display. And they’re flexible: If things change, you can always go back and add new fields or take others ...

Read more ...

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews yesterday announced its 2013 class of fellows, who will work as developers and technologists embedded in newsrooms around the world. Fellows spend a year writing code along with reporters, designers and newsroom developers to create new tools for journalism. Fellows for 2013 and their placements include:

• Brian Abelson, The New York Times
• Manuel Aristarán, La Nacion
• Annabel Church, Zeit Online
• Stijn Debrouwere, The Guardian
• Friedrich Lindenberg, Spiegel Online
• Sonya Song, Boston Globe
• Mike Tigas, ProPublica
• Noah Veltman, BBC

Learn more about the fellows from Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

Google Crisis Response created this interactive map showing weather, emergency shelters and power authorities.
 

As the East cost braced for Hurricane Sandy, data journalists across the country were working in realtime to spread the news. We gathered some of the interesting interactive coverage and data visualizations we found from around the web. Have a suggestion for our list? Send it to tony@ire.org or tweet us @IRE_NICAR.

• Timothy Barmann of the Providence Journal put together these maps and graphics tracking power outages in Rhode Island.
• Simon Rogers and John Burn-Murdoch created this interactive for The Guardian Data Blog showing ...

Read more ...

Here’s how to use Google Spreadsheets to import RSS and ATOM data.

ImportFeed for RSS and ATOM

All sorts of data gets pushed out as RSS/ATOM feeds. You can put those in spreadsheets too. The command takes the following form:

=ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems])

• URL of the feed.
• We'll almost always use itemQuery options ("items", "items author", "items title", "items summary", "items url", or "items created"), as they return individual items in the feed while feedQuery just returns metadata about the feed.
• "Items" will be the best default option, as it returns everything you'll ...

Read more ...

By now you may have read that EveryBlock, a Knight Foundation-funded project, has released its source code to the public (here's a browsable version). Getting a chance to look under the hood is a great opportunity to see how other folks tackle some of the tasks we all face, or are likely to. The first thing to note is that the code has the GPL license, which means that if you incorporate any of it into an application you're building and then release that code, it will need to be under the terms of the GPL as well ... Read more ...

On Feb. 20, a group of my colleagues at The New York Times gathered for a daylong series of presentations on a set of APIs that we've been releasing during the past few months. TimesOpen, as it was called, gathered about 140 developers and other folks interested in working with Times data. So what are APIs? The acronym stands for "application programming interface," but another way of describing an API is a programmatic way to access data. Rather than perform SQL queries to return the data you want, you'd use your browser or a script to retrieve data ... Read more ...

Does this describe you? - Interested in learning about data-driven Web development - Stuck with a Windows box and no hope of getting something not blessed by IT - Curious, but a little nervous, about jumping feet first into Linux - A little nervous about jumping feet first into server setup - A little nervous about installing all the stuff you need If it does, then have I got a deal for you. Presenting the painless, totally free, hold-my-hand instructions to get you from crappy IT-blessed Windows install to full-blown open-source development environment that won't destroy what you have and won't require anything ... Read more ...

Folks doing CAR are blessed with a wealth of tools, which is both a blessing and a curse. For example, I frequently use two database programs, MySQL and PostgreSQL, at work. While similar in most respects, they have slightly different syntax for some common tasks such as string functions. You see this situation played out on the NICAR-L listserv all the time, when someone asks a question that usually starts with, "I know I've done this before, but I can't seem to remember the right syntax." Keeping snippets of SQL or Excel IF statements lying around in files ... Read more ...

I’ve spent the past year slowly making the transition from classic Active Server Pages (ASP) programming to ASP.NET. Yes, yes I know this is not Django or any of the other "hot" frameworks out there right now. But we are a Microsoft shop and I have no support for non-Microsoft products; and more importantly, no time or energy to tackle it myself. Learning a new tool is hard enough. So I thought I’d write a bit about my experience so far. I’ll start by saying all of my programming skills are self-taught — mostly through the bang-your-head-against-a-brick-wall ... Read more ...

As NICAR conference sessions go, it was a first: "World-class CAR on 99 cents a day: Linux and open-source software in the newsroom." That demo room session by Aron Pilhofer at the 2002 computer-assisted reporting in Philadelphia was the first time that open source made an appearance on the program. But in a way, IRE itself began as the kind of project that we might consider open-source: a collaborative effort by journalists from across the United States to tackle a problem together. And the organization's role in gathering and disseminating knowledge via tipsheets, presentations and training (to say nothing ... Read more ...