Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
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Our Database of Troubled Cops, and How You Can Help
By Matt Wynn
Posted onSo far, we’ve collected more than 220,000 records detailing the troubles of police, and the collection continues to grow. The data is already being shared with reporters across the USA TODAY Network of more than 100 newsrooms coast to coast. Now we’re making the same information available to you.
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How We Mapped More Than 100 Years Of Wildfire History
By Chris Hagan and Emily Zentner
Posted onQuantifying chaos: building Capital Public Radio’s California Wildfire History map using a CalFire geodatabase, MapBox and a whole lot of Google searching.
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Introducing Civic: Elections Data Management from POLITICO
By Tyler Fisher
Posted onA walkthrough of our system to manage election data, plus how you can help us build it.
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How 21 Newsrooms Pooled Funds for Texas Public Data
By Matt Dempsey
Posted onHigh fees for public data are a huge problem. Here’s how 21 newsrooms in Texas banded together to buy one $3,500 voter database.
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How We Built a Database from Thousands of Police Reports
By MaryJo Webster
Posted onHow we built our massive analysis of sexual assault cases in Minnesota, with tools that anyone on our team could use.
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How We Made “Sending Even More Immigrants to Prison”
By Yolanda Martinez
Posted onA data project that shows how the U.S. government has prioritized immigration deterrence and criminalization.
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How We Made the New Big Mac Index Interactive
By Martín González, Evan Hensleigh, Matt McLean, Marie Segger, and Alex Selby-Boothroyd
Posted onA walkthrough of making an iconic index new again.
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Calling All Platypuses
By Hannah Birch
Posted onWho do you know who is editorially minded, works well with CMSes, likes HTML/CSS, enthusiastically corrects people’s grammar, and is great at managing details, big projects or both?”
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How We Made the “Bundyville” Podcast & Series
By Leah Sottile
Posted onThe long road to a series and a podcast, as a solo journalist.
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How We Made Our “Crossing Divides” News Game
By Luke Hutton, Fionntán O’Donnell, Pietro Passarelli, and Alli Shultes
Posted onHow we made a chat-based game that aimed to bridge social divisions.
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Diary of a Local Data Reporter
By Rachel Alexander
Posted onA deep dive into the ethics and process behind an investigation into overdoses in Spokane, Washington.
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How We Made Unequal Justice
By Ann Choi, Erin Geismar, James Stewart, and Will Welch
Posted onOur two-part series that painted a picture of disparate justice systems on Long Island depending on race or ethnicity.
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The Sound of Disparity
By Jim Briggs and Sinduja Rangarajan
Posted onInside Reveal’s incredible data sonification project, bringing Silicon Valley’s diversity problem to our ears.
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The Perks of Being a Quitter
By Stephen Stirling
Posted onEverything was going very wrong, and so we gave up on our best idea.
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How We Found New Patterns in LA’s Homeless Arrest Data
By Christine Zhang
Posted onHow we got the numbers on arrests of the homeless in LA, how we vetted the numbers, and, most importantly, how we found the story behind—and beyond—the numbers.
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How We Made “The Melting of Antarctica”
By Lauren Tierney
Posted onFor over 120 years, National Geographic magazine has mapped Antarctica, and continues to visually illustrate the complex processes that occur on this remote continent. The tradition continues with “The Melting of Antarctica,” published in the July 2017 issue, highlighting the effect that climate change is having on the continent.
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Don’t Delete Evil Data
By Lam Thuy Vo
Posted onThere’s a lot of bad data floating around—bad as in abusive or part of a criminal enterprise—and we should archive it, structure it and make it accessible to the public.
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Our Font Is Made of People
By Alberto Cairo and Scott Klein
Posted onAll about ProPublica’s new Wee People font of human silhouettes, free for all to use.
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How We Made Our School Segregation Interactive
By Alvin Chang and Erin Kissane
Posted onWe really appreciated Vox’s recent illustrated interactive on school segregation and gerrymandering—particularly because its creator, Alvin Chang, worked alongside Tomas Monarrez, a UC Berkeley economics PhD candidate.
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Do You Want This Life?
By David Rodriguez
Posted onThis was my first time using public data, and I remember thinking it was going to be so easy. The data was right there, in a good format, in public, just waiting to be analyzed. And at the data bootcamp, I had picked up some data-cleaning skills, so I figured fixing any errors would be no sweat.