The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
A nine year-old girl was beaten to death by her foster brother in Kentucky, but the tragedy did not become a statistic. The state agency in charge of counting abused children didn’t categorize it as a death, attorney Jon Fleischaker said in the “Legal issues, access and big data” session.Local and state government goes to…
Read MoreThe plethora of data visualization tools available these days creates a high-quality problem: a lack of resources to create visualizations becomes a hard task of choosing which of the many to use. Sharon Machlis of Computerworld offers a rapid-fire, well organized and nearly comprehensive inventory of data visualization tools that can be deployed for little…
Read MoreUsing tabletop.js, one editor and two researcher, presenter Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones got the remarkable 47% graphic online for Mother Jones in under five hours. If that’s not reason enough for you to try tabletop.js, consider this: Raja says Tabletop has been an absolute “game changer” for the Mother Jones newsroom. Think of tabletop.js…
Read MoreAfter 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…
Read MoreThere is a saying about software engineering that could easily be applied to formatting data. The truism goes something like, “it’s like looking for black cats in a dark room that has no cats in it.” And then, someone yells, ‘I got one!’” Well, Joe Kokenge of ProPublica is practicing animal control. His presentation on…
Read MoreJohn Keefe of WNYC said anticipate question before your audiences asks them. Is a hurricane headed my way? Am I in a flood zone? Preparing for an emergency should happen before the storm sirens start blaring. The same goes for your data visualizations, Keefe said. His newsrooms uses Google Fusion tables, Mapbox and Google Spreadsheets…
Read MoreIf 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…
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreThis three-part series moderated by Brant Houston of the University of Illinois walks through a data-driven story, from interviewing the data to proving the story to your editor to telling it to your audience. Using a database (available from the NICAR data library) of government-backed loans from the Small Business Administration, a group of reporters…
Read MorePhotos by Travis Hartman 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…
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