Features
Roundup US Word Cup Roundup
- By Tom Meagher
- FiveThirtyEight, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post
Data editor and soccer fan Tom Meagher rounds up interesting, unusual, and beautifully executed apps and interactives.
Project All About the WSJ’s Penalty Kick Interactive
In the days before the World Cup’s knockout stages, with their potential for games to end in shootout finishes, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an app that visualized the tendencies of the top penalty kicks takers on the teams advancing in the tournament. Chris Canipe, senior news apps developer on the Wall Street Journal’s interactive graphics desk, talked with me about the thinking behind the project and how he and his colleagues put it together. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Project The NYT’s Detroit Foreclosure Interactive
Last week, the New York Times published an interactive photo-mosaic of 43,634 Detroit properties at serious risk of foreclosure. As you scroll down the page, viewing neighborhood after neighborhood, the number of properties and the total amount owed on them adds up at the top of the page. We contacted Matthew Bloch and Haeyoun Park at the Times to ask about the making of the interactive and the design choices they made along the way.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 30
- By Erika Owens
Hacks/Hackers London meetup today and tomorrow kicks off Julython, a month-long event where developers around the world work on pet projects and track their progress and commits.
Roundup Meet FCC Squishify and OpenImage
- By Erin Kissane
- Matt Carroll , Brian Jacobs, Joanna S. Kao, Sebastian Kraus, Yvonne Leow, Dan Schultz, Andrew Tran, Andrew Vitvitsky
- OpenNews
In part one and part two of our #owhack report-backs, we introduced four new projects that emerged from the Hack Day. Today, we introduce the final two and wrap up with our notes from the event’s closing circle.
Project Mandy Brown and Trei Brundrett on Vox Product
On Tuesday, Vox Media announced that it was acquiring the technology and co-founding team of the late and much-missed collaborative writing tool Editorially. We chatted with Editorially’s Mandy Brown and Vox Media’s Trei Brundrett about the team’s next steps, the probability of open sourcing more code, and the internal Vox hack week going on at this very moment.
Roundup Meet KeyBlur and America’s Slow Lane
- Zeynep Heyzen Ateş, Chris Barr, Lyre Calliope, Harlo Holmes, Friedrich Lindenberg, Rebekah Monson, Aurelia Moser, Latoya Peterson, Chris Sopher, Mike Tigas, Marcos Vanetta, Kawandeep Virdee
Earlier today, I posted a few details about works-in-progress emerging from last weekend’s MIT-Knight-Mozilla Hack Day. The event produced six great projects, and we have two more to share with you: KeyBlur and America’s Slow Lane.
Roundup Meet Disputed Territories and SSN Redactor
- By Erin Kissane
- Manuel Aristarán, Jos Flores, Alyson Hurt, Waldo Jaquith, Jonathan Stray, Ying Quan Tan, Gus Wezerek, Katie Zhu
- OpenNews
Over the weekend, we put on the third Knight-Mozilla-MIT Hack Day, leading into the 2014 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. As usual, the hack day was loosely organized around the conference’s theme: this year, “The Open Internet and Everything After.” After 24 hours of hacking in the welcoming environment of the MIT Media Lab (spread over two days because we believe in sleeping), we ended up with six wonderful projects ranging from an ultra-practical redaction utility to a fake astroturf campaign againt Net Neutrality.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 23
- By Erika Owens
Open Source Bridge and Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences on the west coast of the U.S. this week, plus Hacks/Hackers round the world.
Project 3D Printing/Printed Explainer at the WSJ
- By Jonathan Keegan
- Paul Antonson, Megan Douglass, Jonathan Keegan, Roger Kenny, Lakshmi Ketineni, Mike Sudal
- The Wall Street Journal
Mini hit the web, and it reached newsstands today. It was accompanied by an explainer video that demystifies 3D printing tech, and a downloadable, printable 3D model of a sales growth chart from the review itself. The combination of hardware and data was irresistable, so we chatted with Jon Keegan about the project’s origins and their physical-digital plans for future features.
Project Covering the European Elections with Linked Data
The BBC News Labs team explores ways of exposing linked data in public-facing election coverage, and encounters some interesting challenges.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 3
- By Erika Owens
“Follow the money” hackathon this weekend throughout Latin America, and get your SRCCON session proposals in by Friday.
Tool All About the dailygraphics Rig from NPR
- By Christopher Groskopf, Alyson Hurt, Erin Kissane
- Jeremy Bowers, Tyler Fisher, Christopher Groskopf, Alyson Hurt
- NPR
Last week, NPR’s Visuals team released their dailygraphics rig, which offers workflow for small-scale visualizations, interactives, and graphics, along with “automated machinery for creating, deploying and embedding these mini-projects.” Their introductory blog post breaks down how to set up and use the rig, and the code is open source and ready to use. Alyson Hurt joined last week’s OpenNews community call to talk a little about the project, and we chatted with her and Christopher Groskopf afterward about how the rig came to be, what kind of skills are required to use it, and their aim to improve code quality and culture through process-improving tools.
Roundup Event Roundup, May 21
- By Erika Owens
Hacks/Hackers meeting up in Berlin and Lima this week. Deadlines approaching for HacksLabs grants and SRCCON proposals.
Project Behind the Scenes of “Fewer Helmets, More Deaths”
A visualization story on what happens when states repeal their universal helmet laws attracted some attention last month for both its content and unusual (but well-received) design. We thought it might amuse readers to see how heavily iterated it was, and how certain decision points along the way helped us to sculpt a design that was mobile-centric without compromising fluidity in the desktop version.
Project Lessons from the Project Thunderdome Shutdown
- By Tom Meagher
Project Thunderdome’s former data editor on the ongoing rescue effort for Thunderdome news apps and the things he’d do differently the next time.
Roundup Derek Willis on Newsroom Innovation
A tweeted rebuttal to selected claims in the NYT Innovation Report from a journalism-code insider at the Times.
Project GDELT and the Problem of Decontextualized Data
Two recent FiveThirtyEight data journalism stories on Nigerian kidnappings use GDELT data in ways that don’t account for that dataset’s sources and biases. Here’s why that matters.
Roundup What “Open” Really Means for 538, Vox, and The Upshot
- By Erin Kissane
- Trei Brundrett, Amanda Cox, Andrei Scheinkman, Derek Willis
- FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times, Vox Media
Now that FiveThirtyEight, Vox, and the Upshot have been live for a few weeks, we’re taking a closer look at the data, and especially the code, that each has released.
Roundup Event Roundup, May 5
- By Erika Owens
Hackathons this weekend in Argentina and Brussels, plus Hacks/Hackers meetups around the world this month.
