Here’s a simple approach to learning a new programming language on the job.

What NICAR 2017 looked like through the eyes of a longtime freelance reporter who needed more data skills.

The Computer Assisted Reporting conference brings together digital, data-driven journalists from all over the world.

Make better spreadsheets by thinking about structure, from the beginning.

Projects from the Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, Reveal, Univision, and more.

For a recent story about how Washington Post editor Doris Truong became the center of a partisan online flame war, we wanted to illustrate what happens when a person becomes part of viral false story and subject to online trolling.

I finished a project with a home-built table that was about 16GB, some 60 million rows by 110ish fields. It was…big. Sometimes it was painful. Mostly, though, it worked out, and it got us what I think is a damned good story. Anyway, I think it was Ben Welsh who’d observed something like: We have some good tools to work with Big Data, but not great tools for data that’s not quite so big. I ran into that situation.

Data can be impersonal, especially large datasets with thousands or even millions of records. The fact that most data of this magnitude is calculated by machines is, however, a sharp contrast to the ultimate goal of examining it in the first place—to find human trends and patterns behind the numbers.

The mini-series Mars, that aired on the National Geographic Channel in November 2016, imagined what it would be like to live on Mars in the near future. For the interactive narrative Rewind the Red Planet, we endeavored to show Mars as it was before it was a red desert, back to a time when liquid water may have run freely, between three and four billion years ago. We wanted to allow readers to see ancient Mars in its entirety from a planetary scale, how it may have featured a vast northern ocean, or may have had water trapped in expansive glaciers.

In researching Settling for Misconduct, we had to account for details from hundreds of county and federal court filings, identify thousands of officers named in civil complaints and tally hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary awards. We also needed thorough reporting to connect issues of police misconduct to fiscal accountability. And oh yeah – we had to have a slick web app to present the data to the public.

Lessons learned from trying to create one chart with as many applications, libraries, and programming languages as possible.

Deadlines this week for the JSK fellowship and IFF conference, plus some upcoming events.

Session ideas are due soon for the Internet Freedom Festival, plus a bunch of other upcoming grant and fellowship deadlines.

Applications for ONA’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator are due tomorrow, plus other events and deadlines.

If you’re not buried in elections work, there area few events this week and upcoming deadlines to check out.

For the presidential debate season, NPR is providing live transcripts of the debate with embedded fact checks and annotations throughout each debate night. Coordinating the workflow between live transcriptions, live fact-checking, and a live-updating page inside of our CMS was no small undertaking, resulting in what may have been our team’s most complicated technical architecture yet.

Reader trust is fragile and easily betrayed, and competition is fierce. Newsrooms can’t afford to ignore the way our work affects our readers when their contexts conflict with our expectations.

How Reveal found Los Angeles’s biggest residential water users by using satellite imagery, QGIS and more: a non-layman’s guide.

Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve been browsing lately: Texas unholstered, an Instagram narrative, the richest data in New Jersey, and more.

Discriminatory design and decision-making affects all aspects of our lives: from the quality of our health care and education to where we live to what scientific questions we choose to ask. Here are just a few of the many tangible, visual examples that humans interact with every day.