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.

Matt DeRienzo @mattderienzo

As #NICAR23 kicks off, @publicintegrity is thrilled to announce that it has acquired and will grow The Accountability Project, an innovative tool allowing journalists to search and analyze 1.8 billion+ public records.

publicintegrity.orgPublic Integrity acquires tool to make data more accessible to journalistsThe Accountability Project is a platform that allows journalists to search 1.8 billion public records and counting.

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:

  • Samantha Sunne @SamanthaSunne

    Another good DEI resource #nicar23: the @Chalkbeat @RJI guide to source diversity trackers

    

    chalkbeat.orgWe’re launching a free tool for journalists to track source diversityHere’s how other newsrooms can sign up.

  • Diversity source tracking: A great checklist for getting started with tracking whether your media outlet’s sources are diverse enough.

  • Gender: Slides from a presentation on data assuming a male gender in data.

• 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.

  • TuitionTracker.org

  • College Scorecard

  • College Scorecard Data

  • National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

  • Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)

• 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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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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