Data goodies from the NICAR conference

THE BEST OF THE WEB FOR DATA JOURNALISTS

Nice to meet you!
This is something I wrote for my mailing list, The Data Journalism Newsletter. If you like it, sign up here to get emails like these auto-magically in your inbox every Sunday. Enjoy!

The 2019 NICAR Conference

Weeding out the very best of this years NICAR data feast took some doing - so this dispatch comes to you now instead of Sunday... Next to all the new things I've learned, I also ate my first s'more, walked the beach every day, played skeeball with new friends and met some of you in real life. :D In short: it was another wonderful conference with lots of fun stuff and brain explosions - in a good way. 🤯

FYI: this weeks newsletter limits itself to my personal #nicar19 favorites; Sarah Machlis created a far more complete list with most tipsheets, github repo's and handouts.

Often overlooked, but of the most importance: the things and thinking you should do before you ever begin your analysis, by MaryJo Webster Jaimi Dowdell and Rob Barry.
Regular expressions (or regex) are a programming language to match patterns in text. Christian McDonald shared a friendly introduction for this powerful data cleaning tool.
Notes on doing local data journalism.
Want to learn how to code? Scott Phan and CJ Sinner shared insights and useful links on how to teach yourself. :)
Don't want to learn how to code? Samantha Sunne shared how to scrape the web without programming.
Buzzfeeds' Scott Pham uses GeoPandas more than QGIS: “it integrates nicely with Jupyter Notebooks and uses Pandas under the hood, both of which are regular parts of my daily data journalism toolkit” He shared some notebooks to show you how it's done.
Building your own database can be wonderful, terrifying and demanding all at the same time. Steven Rich spoke about do's and don'ts.
Create static and interactive with the Altair library for Python. Favorite for its ease of use; its foundation in Vega-Lite that leads to Flourish compatibility; and advanced options like combining two charts. (See image.)
For those who use R: Andrew Tran from the Washington Post did a session on mapping with R, while Peter Aldhous talked about text analysis.
Wrapping it all up with the winners of the Philip Meyer Awards:
- Hurricane Maria killed hundreds of people - the Puerto Rican government excluded lots of them from official death counts. By Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, Quartz and The Associated Press.
- The Philadelphia Inquirer used crowdsourcing and scientific tests to find Philadelphia schools to be incubators for illness.
- Some wealthy philanthropists got tax breaks by donating stocks to their private foundations. A thorough investiation by The Wall Street Journal.

Till Sunday!

Best, Winny