My very blurry shot of Ben Welsh’s lightning talk.
A few weeks ago, I went to NICAR in Baltimore and had a blast. NICAR, which stands for National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, brings together investigative reporters, technologists and news nerds for a three day annual conference.
What strikes me so much about this community is how incredibly smart and generous everyone is. I learned a ton of new things and left inspired and full of ideas. (I also wrote a few posts for work, like this one. Go read it.)
I’m taking Matt Waite’s 5 step plan to heart and I’m starting by making a list of the coding projects that I’m going to do this year.
1) A twitter bot. Actually two. After Brian Abelson’s et al fascinating session on Twitter bots, I got quite a few ideas (specific details TK).
2) A mood cube. After reading this post by John Keefe on how he made a mood cube for his wife to track her period, I bought a bunch of stuff at Spark Fun. I was planning to do his hands-on training but I ended up missing it, so I’m going to do it on my own and see how that goes.
3) A Python scraper to automate certain tasks at work. On IJNet, we publish these training announcements for journalists that are very formulaic. I want to build a scraper that would take the info from the targeted website and spit it out as a piece of text (much like the LA scraper of the police blotter or their earthquake bot.)
4) A news game using Twinery based on Sisi Wei’s presentation.
Although I went to a bunch of sessions, I missed many, and I’m trying to catch up. Here’s a quick list of resources from the IRE website:
-Amazon Cloud Basics – Pinboard from speaker Scott Klein
Tips & tricks for grabbing data from websites from Klein
-Love your life, retire your servers – Slides from speakers Andy Boyle and Tasneem Raja
–Hacks or Hackers? – Tipsheet from speaker Wolf
-Build your first News App – Tipsheet from speaker Ben Welsh
-DataViz for everyone: A practical guide to going responsive – GitHub repository from speaker Chris Amico
-How PANDA works: Software architecture for big data – Slides from speaker Chris Groskopf
-50 ideas in 50 minutes – Spreadsheet from speaker MaryJo Webster
–Everyday scripting – GitHub repository from speaker Agustin Armendariz
-SQLite for command line – GitHub repository from speaker Matt Kiefer | Slides from Kiefer
–Introduction to mapping: Importing and displaying data geographically with QGIS – Tipsheet from speaker Peter Aldhous
-Counting and summing with SQL – Tipsheet from speaker Andrea Fuller
-An app for that: Mobile tech and tools for reporting – Slides from speaker David Ho
-You won’t believe what static site generators can do for news apps – The NPR visuals team’s opinionated project template for client-side apps
-Tools for Social Network Analysis investigations – Slides from speaker Rich Gordon
Other highlights
-Jeremy Bowers’ lightning talk: “The whole Internet in 5 minutes”
-Ben Welsh’s lightning talk: “You must learn”
–Static vs dynamic web applications
Related content – other coverage of NICAR
–Editing Data Projects — Even If You’re Not a “Data Person.” – Investigative News Network
–Let’s get physical: Discovering data in the world around us – Knight Lab
–The annual NICAR lightning talks have become the highlight of the conference – Knight Lab
–Brainstorming ideas for social network analysis in investigations and journalism – Knight Lab
My coding blog 