The IRE office will be closed from December 25th to January 5th.
CAR Conference Blog
Photos from ‘A night on the town’
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.
Read MoreGetting started with an open-source database manager: MySQL
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…
Read MoreData Viz on the fly
John 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 MoreIntegrity checks and simple data cleaning – the art of doubt
There 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 MoreHadley Wickham explains data science for the perplexed
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…
Read MoreSmarter interactive web projects with Google spreadsheets and Tabletop.js
Using 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 MoreData viz on a shoestring
The 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 MoreBeware of data – cautionary tips and tales of statistics
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…
Read MoreInspect This: The many uses of inspection data
Take a ride to understand inspection data. Megan Luther of IRE said. Buckle up next to an inspector and get to know their world: how often they inspect, how do they do it? How often? Do they inspect everyone on a set timeline, or just the new kids on the block? What is the inspection…
Read MoreMaking the best use of the conference
IRE executive director Mark Horvit and training directors Jaimi Dowdell and Megan Luther offered advice this morning for how to make the best use of the conference. For first-time attendees, here are a few basic things to keep in mind: There are three types of sessions: panels, demos and hands-on rooms. Panels follow a fairly…
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