Event Projects from the OpenNews-MIT Hack Day
On the weekend leading into the Knight-MIT Civic Media Conference, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and MIT sponsored a hack day focused on data liberation and housed at the MIT Media Lab.
Project Creating an API of Veterans Affairs’ data
- By Cole Goins, Erika Owens, Shane Shifflett
- Cole Goins, Shane Shifflett
- The Center for Investigative Reporting
The Center for Investigative Reporting recently released an API of data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which it compiled in reporting on a backlog of disability claims.
Learning What You Need Is a News Peg
Ben Welsh on making data journalism work with that time-honored strategy, the news peg
Learning Predicting the Future, Elections Edition
Wherein Jeremy Bowers gets help from experts, builds an election-predicting app, and makes sure readers can see how it works.
Learning Sane Data Updates Are Harder than You Think: Part 2
Second in a three-part series by Adrian Holovaty about hairy data-parsing problems from a journalist’s perspective
Learning Finding Stories in the Structure of Data
Matt Waite sees structure in unstructured data, and you should too.
Event The GEN Newsgaming Hackathon
Last weekend, ten teams participated in a competition to develop newsgames at Editors’ Lab New York, a hackathon organized by the Global Editors Network and The New York Times.
Combining the fantastical and playful aspects of gaming with hard news is a hard problem and there are few examples of well-conceived and executed newsgames. Thanks to the hack day, there are now a few more.
Learning London Calling: Winning the Data Olympics
Jacqui Maher on wrangling massively complex, really messy data in (almost) realtime.
Roundup Event Roundup, Apr 22
- By Erika Owens
Journalists gather in Italy this week, while Hacks/Hackers chapters hold meetups on balloon mapping and HTML 5, plus a cryptoparty.
Learning Freeing the Plum Book
Derek Willis mines government mobile apps to liberate data and issues a call to arms for collaboration.
Learning Olympics Lessons: Data Journalists, Meet Your Audience
The NYT’s Tiff Fehr on figuring out what Olympics fans expected and how her team made them happy.
Project Introducing Tabula
- By Manuel Aristarán, Mike Tigas
- Manuel Aristarán, Jeremy B. Merrill, Mike Tigas
- OpenNews, ProPublica
A new PDF data extraction tool conceived by Manuel Aristarán and built out in a collaboration between Aristarán, who is a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at La Nación, and Mike Tigas, Fellow at ProPublica, and ProPublica’s Jeremy B. Merrill.
Learning How the Data Sausage Gets Made
Jacob Harris explains the perils of making government food safety data usable for journalistic research.
Learning Sane Data Updates Are Harder than You Think
First in a three-part series by Adrian Holovaty about hairy data-parsing problems from a journalist’s perspective
Tool ProPublica’s News Apps Guides
Yesterday morning, the ProPublica apps team released a series of documents outlining their coding philosophy, app design and development practices, data validation techniques, and more. We spoke with Scott Klein about how his team’s processes evolved and how they made the time to document it all.
Event Election Hacking at MozFest
- By Erin Kissane
- Bloomberg, Knight Lab, NPR, OpenNews, ProPublica, Sourcefabric, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Spokesman-Review, The Times and Sunday Times, Ushahidi
At MozFest today in London, OpenNews led a 70-person session on election-related news apps and tools.
