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Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

Features

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.
Building “The Lobotomy Files”

By Chris Canipe

Posted on December 17, 2013
The Wall Street Journal’s Chris Canipe explains how his team built their second-ever immersive project.
About that Guardian Website

By Matt Chadburn

Posted on December 13, 2013
Late last week, a good-sized chunk of the newsroom developers I follow on Twitter linked to the Guardian’s open sourced front-end code for their website, documented in full on GitHub. We spoke with with developer manager Matt Chadburn about the project.
How We Made the Book Concierge

By Shelly Tan

Posted on December 11, 2013
The team behind the Book Concierge talks about their design work, implementation details, and team dynamics.
How We Made “Behind the Bloodshed”

By Anthony DeBarros, Destin Frasier, Erin Kissane, and Juan Thomassie

Posted on December 10, 2013
“Behind the Bloodshed: The Untold Story of America’s Mass Killings,” is a collaboration between the database team at USA Today and Gannett Digital’s interactive applications and design teams. We chatted with Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital, with input from colleagues Juan Thomassie and Destin Frasier, on how the project came together.
Collaborating on the T-Shirt Project

By Brian Boyer and Erin Kissane

Posted on December 2, 2013
Back in April of this year, NPR’s Planet Money began a Kickstarter campaign to learn about and report on global supply chains by making a t-shirt and telling the story of its creation from start to finish. The new Visuals team at NPR collaborated on the project’s web manifestation, which went live last night, but the source code is already on GitHub, and we spoke with team lead Brian Boyer about the collaboration.
How We Made “NSA Files: Decoded”

By Feilding Cage and Gabriel Dance

Posted on November 26, 2013
The Guardian’s Gabriel Dance and Feilding Cage break down their process, from storyboards and video production to major design changes and development challenges.
Finding the Story in 150 Million Rows of Data

By Joanna S. Kao

Posted on November 21, 2013
Al Jazeera America’s Joanna S. Kao on annotating and visualizing the Adobe database hack.
How We Made the (New) California Cookbook

By Megan Garvey, Erin Kissane, Lily Mihalik, and Anthony Pesce

Posted on November 21, 2013
At the Los Angeles Times, a design-editorial-programming team has resurrected the spirit of the beloved, out-of-print California Cookbook as a new website collecting hundreds of recipes from the Times Test Kitchen. In our Q&A;, the project’s editor, designer, and lead programmer share their goals and challenges, and offer a peek at the site’s building blocks and planned future.
How We Made Lobbying Missouri

By Danny DeBelius, Christopher Groskopf, Erin Kissane, and Matt Stiles

Posted on November 12, 2013
Lobbying Missouri is a collaboration between St. Louis Public Radio and members of NPR’s news apps teams. We spoke with three team members about the project, their design process, and the code under the hood.
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.
Model Analysis

By Erik Hinton

Posted on September 17, 2013
The New York Times’ Erik Hinton breaks down a Fashion Week colorbar special feature with bonus fancy math.
Complex But Not Dynamic

By Jeremy Bowers

Posted on September 13, 2013
We usually build relatively simple sites with our app template. Our accessible playgrounds project needed to be more complex. We needed to deal with moderated, user-generated data. But we didn’t have to go full server in order to make this site work; we just modified our app template.
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.
Fast Hacks: Harnessing Google tools for crowdsourced mapping

By Chris Keller

Posted on August 7, 2013
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.
Década Votada, a News App to Track Voting Records

By Mariano Blejman

Posted on July 19, 2013
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).
Meet Poderopedia Plug & Play

By Miguel Paz

Posted on July 5, 2013
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.
How We Made It: Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health

By Justin Falcone

Posted on June 13, 2013
Your Hospital may be Hazardous to Your Health is an interactive web presentation on the widespread danger of in-hospital injury, built in a single week by PBS Frontline, ProPublica, and Ocupop.
Slouching Toward Sensor Journalism

By Matt Waite

Posted on June 11, 2013
Matt Waite explains his drought sensor project and breaks down the promise of sensor journalism.
How We Made Finding Care

By David Eads and Maria Ines Zamudio

Posted on June 10, 2013
The Chicago MigraHack, held earlier this month, focused on the use of technology and open data to produce innovative apps and information tools on immigration and related topics. Nine teams participated, and we spoke with two members of the team that produced Finding Care, winner of the prize for best storytelling with data visualization.