Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

  1. Introducing csvdedupe

    By Derek Eder and Forest Gregg

    Posted on

    Introducing csvdedupe, an open source command line tool for de-duplication and entity resolution.

  2. Sane Data Updates Are Harder than You Think: Part 3

    By Adrian Holovaty

    Posted on

    Third in a three-part series by Adrian Holovaty about hairy data-parsing problems from a journalist’s perspective

  3. Event Roundup, Aug 12

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    This Saturday is the last day to apply to the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, plus Django hacking with jail data in Chicago.

  4. Responsive CSS Testing Made Simple with the BBC’s Wraith

    By David Blooman, John Cleveley, Erin Kissane, and Simon Thulbourn

    Posted on

    Last November, the BBC News team created a front-end regression tool that collects and diffs screenshots to automatically highlight discrepancies produced (intentionally or otherwise) by CSS changes. Last week, the team open-sourced Wraith. We spoke with David Blooman, who developed the tool last fall and worked with Simon Thulbourn to prepare it for public release.

  5. They Are Tweet Zombies!! They Are Followers!!

    By Jacob Harris

    Posted on

    Jake Harris on how dead accounts and spambots can mess with your Twitter data mojo

  6. Fast Hacks: Harnessing Google tools for crowdsourced mapping

    By Chris Keller

    Posted on

    On his second day at KPCC, Chris Keller and team wanted to build a crowdsourced map of experiences at the polls. Here’s how they did it and what they learned for the next election day.

  7. Event Roundup, Aug 5

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    This week is quiet, which leaves you plenty of time to prepare session proposals for the Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Media Party, Mozilla Festival, and PyCon.

  8. Ultralight CMSes Head to Head

    By Katie Zhu

    Posted on

    Ultralight CMSes are, in many ways, the product of hacking or infecting the CMS. Here’s a breakdown of a few popular ones, complete with setup instructions, pro/cons, and newsroom case studies.

  9. Event Roundup, July 29

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    Start brainstorming ideas for the Hacks/Hackers Media Party and the Mozilla Festival.

  10. Know Your Stats

    By Dave Stanton

    Posted on

    Read Dave Stanton’s essential primer on basic statistical principles and you won’t get caught with your data pants down.

  11. Drawing Conclusions from Data

    By Jonathan Stray

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    In this OpenNews Learning special, Jonathan Stray presents an equation-free statistics talk on data and the shape of randomness.

  12. Event Roundup, July 22

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    Meetups in DC, London, and Jerusalem on Wednesday. And Friday in New York, we’re holding an info session on the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship.

  13. Década Votada, a News App to Track Voting Records

    By Mariano Blejman

    Posted on

    In April 2013, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires hosted a hackathon on D3.js. As part of a project co-sponsored by the International Center for Journalists, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews provided seed funding to the winning project, an app called “Década votada” (q decade in votes).

  14. The Perils of Polling Twitter

    By Jacob Harris

    Posted on

    Jake Harris on just a few of the myriad reasons why using tweets as data is less than ideal.

  15. All About Transcribable

    By Erin Kissane

    Posted on

    Yesterday, ProPublica released Transcribable, a new open source tool that makes orderly crowdsourced transcription available to any organization that uses Ruby on Rails. ProPublica’s Al Shaw introduced the project to the public in a post on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog yesterday and here answers all our questions about the project.

  16. Event Roundup, July 15

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    This week is the summer OpenStreetMap editathon and a media mega mixer in NYC.

  17. Creating Games for Journalism

    By Sisi Wei

    Posted on

    Sisi Wei makes the case for newsgames and shows you how it’s done

  18. Event Roundup, July 8

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    Many summertime meetups are taking happy hour form, but in India on Sunday Hacks/Hackers will host lightning talks on data visualization.

  19. Meet Poderopedia Plug & Play

    By Miguel Paz

    Posted on

    Let’s say you would like to map politicians and their connections, build a semantic database of companies and top executives in a specific industry, or create a visualization of lobbyists and their clients. With Poderopedia’s free, open source Plug & Play Platform, you can.

  20. Event Roundup, July 1

    By Erika Owens

    Posted on

    July is quiet for events, but there are a few great things happening and it’s never too early to apply for the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship.

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