Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
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Introducing csvdedupe
By Derek Eder and Forest Gregg
Posted onIntroducing csvdedupe, an open source command line tool for de-duplication and entity resolution.
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Sane Data Updates Are Harder than You Think: Part 3
By Adrian Holovaty
Posted onThird in a three-part series by Adrian Holovaty about hairy data-parsing problems from a journalist’s perspective
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Event Roundup, Aug 12
By Erika Owens
Posted onThis Saturday is the last day to apply to the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship, plus Django hacking with jail data in Chicago.
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Responsive CSS Testing Made Simple with the BBC’s Wraith
By David Blooman, John Cleveley, Erin Kissane, and Simon Thulbourn
Posted onLast 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.
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They Are Tweet Zombies!! They Are Followers!!
By Jacob Harris
Posted onJake Harris on how dead accounts and spambots can mess with your Twitter data mojo
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Fast Hacks: Harnessing Google tools for crowdsourced mapping
By Chris Keller
Posted onOn 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.
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Event Roundup, Aug 5
By Erika Owens
Posted onThis 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.
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Ultralight CMSes Head to Head
By Katie Zhu
Posted onUltralight 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.
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Event Roundup, July 29
By Erika Owens
Posted onStart brainstorming ideas for the Hacks/Hackers Media Party and the Mozilla Festival.
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Know Your Stats
By Dave Stanton
Posted onRead Dave Stanton’s essential primer on basic statistical principles and you won’t get caught with your data pants down.
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Drawing Conclusions from Data
By Jonathan Stray
Posted onIn this OpenNews Learning special, Jonathan Stray presents an equation-free statistics talk on data and the shape of randomness.
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Event Roundup, July 22
By Erika Owens
Posted onMeetups in DC, London, and Jerusalem on Wednesday. And Friday in New York, we’re holding an info session on the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship.
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Década Votada, a News App to Track Voting Records
By Mariano Blejman
Posted onIn 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).
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The Perils of Polling Twitter
By Jacob Harris
Posted onJake Harris on just a few of the myriad reasons why using tweets as data is less than ideal.
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All About Transcribable
By Erin Kissane
Posted onYesterday, 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.
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Event Roundup, July 15
By Erika Owens
Posted onThis week is the summer OpenStreetMap editathon and a media mega mixer in NYC.
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Creating Games for Journalism
By Sisi Wei
Posted onSisi Wei makes the case for newsgames and shows you how it’s done
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Event Roundup, July 8
By Erika Owens
Posted onMany summertime meetups are taking happy hour form, but in India on Sunday Hacks/Hackers will host lightning talks on data visualization.
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Meet Poderopedia Plug & Play
By Miguel Paz
Posted onLet’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.
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Event Roundup, July 1
By Erika Owens
Posted onJuly 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.