Project Tracking Amtrak 188
How curiosity and tinkering let Al Jazeera America publish historical data for a derailed train’s route without Amtrak’s cooperation.
Learning Automating Transparency
- By Ed Summers
Sometimes you write a piece of software and it gets used for purposes you didn’t quite imagine at the time. Sometimes you write a piece of software and it unexpectedly rearranges your life.
Learning Consider the Boolean
- By Jacob Harris
The challenge of using binary data structures in a complicated world.
Project Scraping Nevada
Derek Willis breaks down the three stages of scraping (denial, annoyance, and acceptance) while confronting the election-results form from hell.
Learning Marriage Data: It’s Complicated
D’Vera Cohn on Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Marriage Data But Were Afraid to Ask
Learning Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Elections Scraping
Jeremy Merrill and Ken Schwencke explore the fine art of anticipating and catching errors while wrangling the eccentricities of US elections data.
Learning The Census of Governments Has Your Number
Michael Maciag‘s walk-through of this under-utilized goldmine.
Learning Finding Stories in Census Data
Emily Alpert Reyes on how to find promising needles in Census haystacks.
Learning Gender, Twitter, and the Value of Taking Things Apart
Jake Harris reverse-engineers Twee-Q to evaluate its use of data (and see if his ratio is as disappointing as Twee-Q says it is)
Project From the BBC News Labs: Datastringer
Basile Simon walks through the process of building a new tool that aims to help reporters cover beats, and that was prompted by work by Knight-Mozilla Fellows and a presentation at Hacks/Hackers London.
Project Comparing the Net Cost of College
The Chronicle of Higher Education set out to compare net cost of colleges and found an unexpected discrepancy. The team describes the piece they created to help explain the difficulty in comparing net costs.
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.
Learning Pushing Hot Buttons with Census.gov
Ronald Campbell on using census data to find facts in a world of speculation
Learning Distrust Your Data
- By Jacob Harris
Jacob Harris on six ways to make mistakes with data—and how to avoid them.
Learning How to Use the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey like a Pro
Paul Overberg explains base tables and how to get the best data from them (hint: ask good questions!).
Learning Newsroom Analytics: A Primer
Jacqui Maher says it’s not just the numbers, it’s what they mean about the audience.
Project How We Made the SOTU Twitter Visualization
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.
Learning You Got the Documents. Now What?
Jonathan Stray’s guide to turning documents into data you can run with.
Learning Human-Assisted Reporting Gets the Story
Tyler Dukes on combining the power of data-sorting tools with old-fashioned digging.
