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Posts Tagged ‘database’
National: Home in on top donors, bundlers, super PACs
By Viveca Novak Center for Responsive Politics The 2012 election promises to be the most expensive on record. One important way in which it differs from the 2008 contest: the presence of more outside groups, spending much more money, thanks to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 and subsequent legal…
Read MoreShare your thoughts for IRE’s conference logo
Send us your creative, inspired ideas yearning to be on our website or a T-Shirt. The 2012 IRE Conference is coming to Boston, and we’re looking for your help. After the success of the Computer Assisted Reporting Conference T-shirt contest, we want to hear more design ideas from our members. IRE staff and students are working…
Read MoreCall for IRE Board of Directors candidates
Seven seats up for election on IRE board The filing period has begun for those planning to run for the IRE board of directors. Seven seats on the 13-member board are up for election. The election will be held June 16 at the IRE annual conference in Boston. The IRE board serves as the governing…
Read MoreGoing beyond the campus for coverage
By Mayra Cruz @MayraC27 Campus coverage can be daunting, but looking beyond the campus is a way to get the story, Jennifer Wheeler of The Register-Mail said at “DataU: the databases you need to cover higher ed.” From grants to graduation rates, one of the major databases to mine for information is the Integrated Postsecondary…
Read MoreFinding out what public figures don’t want you to know
By Jon McClure@JonRMcClure Sex sells. But it sometimes buys, too. Online. As described in the panel “Hidden databases: Mining the private parts of public officials,” the trick is learning how to uncover the online footprint of public figures and track the nefarious deeds they might do under the cover of online alter-egos. Russ Ptacek of…
Read MoreHack the Census
By Anna Boiko-Weyrauch@AnnaBoikoW “Hacking the Census” was a collection of lightning talks on tools, tricks and codes to hack the Census and American Community Survey, ranging from introductory to advanced. Steve Doig, professor at Arizona State University, said the Census has information about people and households, of course, but there’s also info on business, education, foreign trade, and more.…
Read MoreDouble-check environmental data
Many investigative reporters are recreational data users, but data alone cannot be trusted. “You can’t take what is in those databases for granted,” said Kate Golden, a reporter and multimedia producer for WisconsinWatch.org. At the panel “Environmental analyses for any newsroom,” she emphasized the importance of speaking with the lead agency to find out what…
Read MoreGetting around PIOs with Web Inspector
By Mayra Cruz @MayraC27 One way to get around bureaucratic hassles is to get the to the data directly by scraping it off the Web. The fight for public records can sometimes be avoided by taking the data directly from websites, Dan Nguyen of ProPublica said. On Saturday, Nguyen led a hands-on class of “Web…
Read MoreSorting through chaos — analyzing Twitter data
By Anna Boiko-Weyrauch@AnnaBoikoW Tweets are tempting but tricky for data journalists. “Twitter data is probably some of the hardest data you can work with,” Jacob Harris, senior software architect at The New York Times, said at the “Capturing and analyzing Twitter feeds” session. Harris said tweets are hard to collect and analyze, and the tools available at dev.twitter.com are not…
Read MoreGetting data from public agencies
By Sarah Morris@smorris198888 In The Art of Requesting and Negotiating Data, David Hunn of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica talked through some strategies for getting data. LaFleur began by saying that data can come from inspections, licenses, things that are enforced or purchased. If there was a form, then there would…
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