NICAR 23 Conference Tools and Resources
March 7, 2023
The NICAR 23 conference was last weekend in Nashville. I speak at the conference most years and always return energized and full of new ideas, albeit a little hung over.
After spending a couple of days recovering, I wanted to share some of the great tools and resources I learned about over three eventful days in the Music City.
Sharon Machlis built her annual database of tipsheets and resources from the conference. Bookmark it and use it. NICAR also keeps a archive of tipsheets from the sessions. I’m going to highlight some of my favorites here.
A big announcement came from Matt DeRienzo on the eve of the conference: The Center for Public Integrity has acquired and will grow The Accountability Project.


Tipsheets from some select sessions:
DEI and data reporting: Samantha Sunne of ProPublica and Tools for Reporters and USA Today’s Jayme Fraser hosted a group discussion on diversity. Here’s a crowdsourced set of tips and ideas from the 35-plus in attendance, along with other resources:
Beyond the Fire Perimeter — Data for Wildfire Investigations: Great tips on how to look critically at wildfire data, issues with it, how to get help and more. Great panel discussion. | Tipsheet
Data scraping: Sunne also did a session called “Data Scraping Withouth Programming” and has detailed slides on scraping web pages.
Mapping and geographic analysis: Data, notes, and code for Peter Aldhous’ session on mapping and geographic analysis with Rstats. | Tipsheet
Excel basic stats: Todd Wallack of WBUR went through some excellent formulas and techniques. Tipsheet
Christine Jeavans and Libby Rogers of BBC News did a training on QGIS mapping. | Tipsheet
Education: A couple of panels offered some resources for investigating tuition and enrollment equity at universities and HBCUs.
Measuring success: Julia Haslanger tweeted slides from her session "Defining and measuring the success of your published work.
Teach the Teachers: How do you train students and journalists on how to practice data journalism? A group of seasoned trainers offer some excellent tips. | Tipsheet
More Teaching: The Beyond “Skills-Based” session on Contextualizing Data Journalism for Students gives a great overview on how to think through teaching data classes at a deeper level. The quote in the first slide should be shared in every class.
More slides and tipsheets: Slides on covering long COVID | tipsheet on data visualization accessibility | Three new file formats for your toolbox | Who’s Behind This Website? slides | Tools to Investigate Your State Government
Data tools: By the way, my session covered useful desktop and mobile tools for data journalists. Check out the Prezi and the handout.
Buy me a beer: Hey, I work hard to find all of these tools for you! Click on the button to buy me a beer (or six). I’m thirsty!
Around the Web
MoneyinPolitics.wtf aims to be the biggest dictionary of campaign-finance jargon.
The Open Notebook is a nonprofit organization that has published more than 500 articles on science journalism.
Stacksearch is a Substack newsletter search tool.
Pimeyes is a facial-recognition, reverse-image search tool.
Data + Journalism Textbook
Samantha Sunne and I co-authored a textbook, “Data + Journalism” that’s available now on Routledge. (Order here). It’s an introductory to intermediate-level guide to learning data storytelling from A to Z.
It features examples, interviews, links to tools and dozens of practical exercises to learn how to find, scrape, clean, visualize and write with data. We also explore ethics, transparency and basic math skills. We even offer a bonus chapter — Chapter 13 — on diversity and inclusion for free on our blog.
In Quotes …
“What journalism is really about … it’s to monitor power and the centers of power.” — Amira Hass, Israeli journalist and author
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