By Jaimi Dowdell, IRE Training Director
IRE Resource Center staff have been busy adding tipsheets from the CAR conference. Handouts include information on forensic accounting, Web scraping, data on deadline, Twitter and more. In addition to this, many of the wonderful presenters and attendees have been sharing their tips, data and tutorials on the NICAR list and via Twitter.
Our friends at the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University blogged about various sessions. Their coverage is online at http://bit.ly/dwgYpZ. Tweets about the conference used two main hashtags: #nicar2010 and #nicar. Photos from Ben Welsh of The Los Angeles Times are online at Flickr. Search “NICAR2010.”
If you weren't able to attend the CAR conference or are ready for more learning, here are some resources to keep you moving:
- “Live your best life on deadline” with Stupid Web Tricks from Ben Welsh, Los Angeles Times.
- QGIS mapping tutorial from Tim Henderson, The Journal News (White Plains, NY).
- While Jeff Larson and Scott Klein of ProPublica released and demonstrated their new Table-Setter application, Chris Groskopf of the Chicago Tribune wrote up notes on how to deploy the application. (All of this and Groskopf wasn't even able to attend the conference.)
- Discover five essential queries with SQL Server and MySQL scripts from a lightning talk by Anthony DeBarros, USA TODAY.
- Manage and juggle your work to make time for CAR with these tips from MaryJo Webster and David Heath, Huffington Post Investigative Fund.
- Resources for mashups and Web mapping on the fly from Niran Babalola of The Texas Tribune.
- Tips on having a data state of mind from MaryJo Webster of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Brant Houston of the University of Illinois.
- As an added bonus, MaryJo has updated her "My Favorite (Excel) Things" handout. It now includes information for Excel 2007.
- "Good Habits When Making Software” from Brian Boyer, Chicago Tribune.
- Details about Open Flash Charts from Tim Henderson. This includes a form that lets you make a simple chart, with links to how to implement it yourself and make more complex charts.
- Trying to learn free stats software R? Bill Alpert of Barron's suggests a website from Pat Burns for beginners as well as a guide, "The R Inferno," from the same author.
- Jacob Fenton, Investigative Reporting Workshop, has created a page for web-only conference resources. It includes front- and back-end code from Fenton’s session about getting started with google maps flash api using flex and geodjango.
- Get story ideas with links to some of the best recent computer-assisted reporting stories.
- Free code from a session on GeoDjango and open layers with Derek Willis, The New York Times and Ben Welsh, Los Angeles Times.
Got some resources you'd like to share? Send them my way and I'll get the word out (jaimi@ire.org). Also, don't forget that the IRE conference in Vegas is just around the corner; check the details out here.
