In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton interviews a number of workers at a biscuit manufacturing company and concludes, unsurprisingly enough, that the place is rather dreary. The difference between a happy home cook and our listless biscuit manufacturing employee comes down to what Ursula Franklin describes in The Real World of Technology as holistic versus prescriptive technologies. In a holistic technology, a single person or small group of people carry through an entire process, from inception to sweeping the crumbs off the floor, making their own decisions and adapting along the way.

At La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.

Recent pieces that we loved from ProPublica and Matter, BuzzFeed, the Daily Herald and WBEZ, New York Magazine, and more.

How we tracked down, processed, filtered, revisualized, mashed up, and otherwise handled a boatload of disparate imagery to map changes in the Louisiana coastline backward and forward in time.

Our now-traditional #botweek closing peers inside our metaphors and the fragile magic of the bots we make, use, and love.

It started as a joke and turned into hashing through thousands of Net Neutrality comments the hard way, then building a chatbot to post them and interact with curious readers.

It’s the last day to apply for grants for women journalists, plus lots of meetups and hackathons this week.

Meetups this week in Manchester, Portland, Vienna, and Philadelphia, plus Thursday is the deadline to submit idea to the Knight News Challenge: Elections.

Meetups this week in Buenos Aires and La Paz, plus a journalism hackathon before SXSW.

This week, hundreds of news nerds will gather in Atlanta for the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting’s annual conference.

Jake Harris on data visualization, empathy, and representing people with dots

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.

An open source elections-data URL locator and parser for Clarity Elections results, from the team at OpenElections.

Last week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.

Lena Groeger on the magical powers of every little thing.

The California Civic Data Coalition issues a challenge.

Live from SRCCON an update you want to know about.

Even among the many wonderful World Cup interactives and news apps we saw this year, the NYT’s Spot the Ball was a standout, both in conception and execution. We spoke with the team behind it about the project’s design, world-class Photoshopping, and surprising inspiration.

Seeking to contribute to the climate change conversation, the team at Enigma started to brainstorm ways we could produce a data-driven story on how climate change has played out in the United States. Browsing through NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, we discovered the Global Historical Climatology Network which collects, aggregates, and standardizes daily weather information from more than 90,000 weather stations, dating as far back as 1800. While we come across many incredible public datasets in our work at Enigma, this one immediately stood out for its remarkable combination of geographic granularity and temporal breadth

At the 2014 OpenNews code convening, we took on the task of making a reusable system that could allow other organizations to produce something sentiment grids with a bare minimum of technical know-how. The result was FourScore, a library that allows you to set a few configuration options to produce your very own interactive sentiment grid. It even works in IE8, and maybe doesn’t totally not work in IE7.