Learning Introducing broca
Made at our recent code convening, broca creates a system for easier experimentation and implementation of natural language processing.
Project Introducing Bedfellows
The financial relationship between PAC contributors and recipients can be difficult to divine from the information reported to the FEC. Bedfellows is a new Python library based on a model developed at The Upshot for understanding those relationships via several different measures.
How-to A Botmaking Primer
Not sure where to begin with this whole bot thing? Joseph Kokenge is here to help you get started with botmaking 101.
Project To Scrape, Perchance to Tweet
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.
Project Introducing Treasury.IO
- By Michael Keller, Cezary Podkul
- Brian Abelson, Jake Bialer, Burton DeWilde, Michael Keller, Thomas Levine, Ashley Williams
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.
Project How We Made the (New) California Cookbook
- By Megan Garvey, Erin Kissane, Lily Mihalik, Anthony Pesce
- Megan Garvey, Lily Mihalik, Anthony Pesce
- The Los Angeles Times
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.
Project How We Made Lobbying Missouri
- By Danny DeBelius, Christopher Groskopf, Erin Kissane, Matt Stiles
- Danny DeBelius, Christopher Groskopf, Matt Stiles
- NPR, St. Louis Public Radio
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.
Project All About Reporter
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.
Tool Introducing csvdedupe
Introducing csvdedupe, an open source command line tool for de-duplication and entity resolution.
Roundup Event Roundup, June 3
- By Erika Owens
Two local ONA chapter meetups this week, and later this June, join Knight-Mozilla OpenNews at MIT.
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 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.
Roundup Event Roundup, Mar 18
- By Erika Owens
The Knight News Challenge deadline is today Tuesday at 5pm Eastern Daylight Time. (Due to technical difficulties, the deadline has been extended one day.)
Roundup Event Roundup, Mar 4
- By Erika Owens
Conference season is gearing up: Last week NICAR, this week SXSW Interactive.
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.
Interview Meet Mariana Santos
The first in a series of interviews with Knight International Journalism Fellows.
Roundup Event Roundup, Feb 25
- By Erika Owens
This week, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference hits Louisville, Kentucky.
Roundup Event Roundup, Jan 28
- By Erika Owens
Google Journalism Fellowship deadline is this week. This weekend, learning with Code with me and hacking with the Sunlight Foundation and Digital Democracy.
Project Chase Davis on fec-standardizer
Chase Davis breaks down his fec-standardizer project and explains where it’s going next.
Roundup Event Roundup, Jan 7
- By Erika Owens
New year and lots of event planning underway. Plus, we’re entering awards entry season: the IRE deadline is this Friday.
