Articles tagged: data

1. 

   How We Made the SOTU Twitter Visualization

   By Nicolas Belmonte and Simon Rogers

   Posted on March 18, 2014

   People tweet what they think, when they think it—and, crucially, we wanted to provide a visualization for the State of the Union speech which reflected that. This wouldn’t be a (shudder) word cloud based on frequencies but a way to track the conversation on Twitter as it was directly influenced by the President’s speech.

2. 

   You Got the Documents. Now What?

   By Jonathan Stray

   Posted on March 13, 2014

   Jonathan Stray’s guide to turning documents into data you can run with.

3. Human-Assisted Reporting Gets the Story

   By Tyler Dukes

   Posted on February 27, 2014

   Tyler Dukes on combining the power of data-sorting tools with old-fashioned digging.

4. How to Make a News App in Two Days

   By Al Shaw

   Posted on January 31, 2014

   As part of the orientation week for the 2014 class of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellows, fellow nerd-cuber Mike Tigas and I led a hackathon at Mozilla’s headquarters in San Francisco…

5. 

   To Scrape, Perchance to Tweet

   By Abe Epton

   Posted on January 14, 2014

   At the Chicago Tribune, we had a simple goal: to automatically tweet contributions to Illinois politicians of $1,000 or more, which campaigns are required to report within five business days. To see, in something approximating real time, which campaigns are bringing in the big bucks and who those big-buck-bearers are. The Illinois State Board of Elections (ISBE) has helpfully published exactly this data for years online, in a format that appears to have changed very little since at least the mid-2000s. There’s no API for this data, but the stability of the format is encouraging. A scraper is hardly an ideal tool for anything intended to last for a while and produce public-facing data, but if we can count on the format of the page not to change much over at least the next several months, it’s probably worth it.

6. Introducing Treasury.IO

   By Michael Keller and Cezary Podkul

   Posted on January 7, 2014

   The U.S. Treasury’s Daily Treasury Statement lists actual cash spending down to the million on everything the government spent money on each day, as well as how it funded the spending. But, the Treasury only releases these files in PDF or fixed-width text files like this one, making any analysis very difficult. To liberate the data and make it easy to analyze federal money flows across time, we created Treasury.IO. The system we built downloads and parses the fixed-width files into a standard schema, creating a SQLite database that can be directly queried via a URL endpoint.

7. 

   Open Your Data

   By Waldo Jaquith

   Posted on November 21, 2013

   Waldo Jaquith on the whys and wherefores of making it open

8. 

   And Remember, this Is for Posterity

   By Jacob Harris

   Posted on November 14, 2013

   Jacob Harris on the hows and whys of designing interactives to survive the future.

9. 

   Building News Apps on a Shoestring

   By Alan Palazzolo

   Posted on October 31, 2013

   Alan Palazzolo on how the MinnPost team rocks it without a big budget

10. 

    Well Hello, Census

    By Joe Germuska

    Posted on October 17, 2013

    Joe Germuska on the iterative, human-centered process that’s made the new Census Reporter project especially awesome.

11. 

    Let research apps, MVC JavaScript, and APIs work for you

    By Agustin Armendariz, Michael Corey, and Aaron Williams

    Posted on October 14, 2013

    The Center for Investigative Reporting continues their work visualizing Department of Veterans Affairs’ data. Here, they discuss their development process.

12. 

    Using Big Data to Ask Big Questions

    By Chase Davis

    Posted on October 4, 2013

    Chase Davis lays down some data science upon us to change how you think about the questions you’re asking of your data

13. 

    US Shutdown Scuttles Data

    By Dan Sinker

    Posted on October 3, 2013

    As the government shutdown grinds into its third day, many news developers, civic data hackers, and open gov activists are starting to feel the hurt due to the suspension of most government data feeds, APIs, and websites. How they’re adapting and collaborating to fill the gaps of the shutdown.

14. 

    The Times Regrets the Programmer Error

    By Jacob Harris

    Posted on September 19, 2013

    Jake Harris opens a serious barrel of monkeys about when and how to issue corrections for data journalism.

15. 

    Kill All Your Darlings

    By Matt Waite

    Posted on September 12, 2013

    Matt Waite on what to do when things don’t work out like you planned.

16. 

    All About Reporter

    By Erin Kissane and Jeremy Singer-Vine

    Posted on September 10, 2013

    The Wall Street Journal’s Jeremy Singer-Vine recently released Reporter, an open source tool that makes it easy to hide and reveal the code behind common forms of data visualization presented on the web. We spoke with him about the tool’s makeup, design goals, and future development plan.

17. 

    People Power Prevails!

    By John Keefe

    Posted on September 5, 2013

    John Keefe on tracking the cicada pestilence with open source sensor journalism and crowdsourced data collection

18. 

    Telling Your Boss “No”

    By Matt Waite

    Posted on August 22, 2013

    Matt Waite says just because you can make it doesn’t mean you should

19. 

    Sane Data Updates Are Harder than You Think: Part 3

    By Adrian Holovaty

    Posted on August 15, 2013

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

20. 

    They Are Tweet Zombies!! They Are Followers!!

    By Jacob Harris

    Posted on August 8, 2013

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