Project A Bot to Find the Source of Serendipity
Just before Thanksgiving last year, a new novelty Twitter account gained notice in our newsroom. @NYTMinusContext, promising “All Tweets Verbatim From New York Times Content. Not Affiliated with New York Times.” tweeted fragments from Times articles that you might not think twice about while reading in article format. Isolated, though, these phrases can be absurd, surprising, and delightful.
Project Model Analysis
The New York Times’ Erik Hinton breaks down a Fashion Week colorbar special feature with bonus fancy math.
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 Responsive CSS Testing Made Simple with the BBC’s Wraith
- By David Blooman, John Cleveley, Erin Kissane, Simon Thulbourn
- David Blooman, John Cleveley, Simon Thulbourn
- BBC News
Last November, the BBC News team created a front-end regression tool that collects and diffs screenshots to automatically highlight discrepancies produced (intentionally or otherwise) by CSS changes. Last week, the team open-sourced Wraith. We spoke with David Blooman, who developed the tool last fall and worked with Simon Thulbourn to prepare it for public release.
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.
Roundup The New Yorker Launches Strongbox
- By Erika Owens
Strongbox uses Tor, and the coding savvy of Aaron Swartz, to help sources communicate more securely with the New Yorker. Its release today inspired a big reaction from the journalism code community.
Project Mapping the History of Street Names
OpenNews Fellow Noah Veltman breaks down the design and code decisions behind his History of SF Place Names map.
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.
Project Under the Hood of the Open Gender Tracker
- By Erin Kissane, J. Nathan Matias, Irene Ros
- Adam Hyland, J. Nathan Matias, Irene Ros
- Bocoup, MIT Center for Civic Media
Open Gender Tracker is an open source deployable content analysis service funded by a Knight Foundation Prototype grant. We spoke with its creators about the project’s origins, technical specifications, and possible future in and near newsrooms.
Roundup 2012 in Review: Al Shaw
- By Al Shaw
ProPublica’s Al Shaw breaks down five outstanding news apps and interactive design choices from 2012, and one game-changer from 2011.
Project The Making of ProPublica’s Pipeline Safety Feature
Last week, ProPublica released an explainer on fires, chemical spills, explosions, and other incidents related to US oil and gas pipelines, along with an interactive map and a series of charts and tables. Reporter-designer-developer Lena Groeger explains how the project came about, what challenges she encountered, and how she assembled the final presentation.
Roundup Event Roundup, Oct 22
- By Erika Owens
Upcoming events for news developers in London, Washington, DC, New York, Kuala Lumpur, and eight cities throughout South and Central America.
Project Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law
We assembled a database of stand your ground cases in Florida to encourage people to explore the cases to see how the law was being applied. We did this because no government entity was tracking such cases.
Project SchoolBook
- By Tyson Evans
- Jeremy Ashkenas, Kim Bost, Ahn Dang, Tyson Evans, Robert Gebeloff, Mary Ann Giordano, Brian Hamman, Jacqui Maher
- The New York Times, WNYC
The New York Times and WNYC have joined forces on a new site dedicated to news, data and conversation about schools in New York City. SchoolBook is now the main place to find coverage of schools in New York by The Times and WNYC. SchoolBook’s home page will mix those news, feature and multimedia stories with essays by members of the education community, as well as photos, videos, queries, comments and more.
