Last week, Alastair Dant, lead interactive technologist at The Guardian, came to Hacks/Hackers NYC to show how his team produces its informative and award-winning interactive graphics.
It’s a wide-ranging talk about what’s new and inspiring about news technology, and how each team member’s unique skills contribute to the whole.
Well worth watching. And if you want to deeply nerd out with The Guardian, check out their Developer Blog.
The projects mentioned in Alastair’s talk:
Twitter replay of the England vs. USA World Cup match (requires Flash)
An interactive map showing the incidents recorded in the military’s Afghan war logs, using documents released by Wikileaks
CAR 2011 was stuffed full of information, so much so that the only way to keep up with everything has been to keep a log of what people have been sharing.
Feb. 28 update: Thanks to everyone who’s forwarded additional links and presentations (I’m marking them with NEW as they’re added) and to all who’ve sent me nice notes about this list.
This year’s conference looks to have been a tremendous success, bringing in the most registered attendees in nearly a decade. Congratulations to NICAR for a terrific, educational and inspiring event.
A more narrative look at what happened at the conference can be found on the conference blog. But if you’re anxious to dive in, this is your buffet: Prepare to have your mind blown.
Got links from sessions you attended? Post them in comments or ping me on Twitter @MacDiva and I’ll add them to this list.
• 3Scale – API management and monetization tool (free trial)
• API Playground – try APIs, no coding skills necessary
• Backbone.js adds a models-collections-views structure to JavaScript applications
• BatchGeo interactive map maker
• Biznar.com – business search engine
• CanIUse.com browser compatibility tables
• Census Block Conversions API
• ChangeTracker from ProPublica – track changes to any website
• ChinaVitae – learn who’s who in power in China
• CollegeInsight – compare universities by cost, financial aid, diversity, job placement rate
• DataWrangler cleans and transforms data
• Download manager downTHEMall is a FireFox extension that grabs webpage links and images.
• Europe Media Monitor’s NewsBrief – an international alternative to Google News
• EUROCONTROL – “find blocked private planes that might have flown to Europe, for example: see which executives are going to Cannes”
• FCC Census Block Conversions API – boundary service API, excellent for mapping
• The FireShot FireFox extension creates browser screenshots, adds annotation and more.
• Foreign Labor Certification Data Center – find what visas a company has applied for (there may be wage information tied to the application)
• Get Lat Lon – finds latitude and longitude for any location worldwide
• Free Google Drawings wireframe templates
• Google Fusion Tables for data analysis and visualization
• Google Refine for data cleaning
• Inmarsat Ships Directory – lookup a ship’s phone number
• JSFiddle online JavaScript editor
• Jigsaw: “Visual analytics for exploring and understanding document collections”
• Little Sis – visualizing the networks of social, financial and political power
• MarineTraffic.com – track vessels in real time
• Mayan open source, Django-based document manager
• Mr. Data Converter converts Excel data into web-friendly formats
• Needlebase
• NETROnline – public records search, especially good for real property lookups
• NodeXL uses Excel for network analysis
• NodeXL Teaching lessons and tutorials
• Numberway.com – lookup phone numbers around the world
• Outwit Hub – FireFox plugin for scraping websites
• PDFonFly – converts web pages to PDFs
• PhraseNet diagrams relationships between words in text
• PostGIS – adds mapping ability to PostgreSQL
• PrivacyChoice – rates website privacy policies
• Protovis
• PySAL an open source Python library for spatial analysis functions
• R statistical analysis software
R libraries recommended by Amanda Cox, Jeff Larson and others: ggplot, RColorBrewer (color picker), rgdal (bindings for GDAL – the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library), survival (survival analysis)
• Recorded Future – temporal analysis search engine uses predictive analytics to discover the likelihood of events in the future
• RSRuby – use the R environment in your Ruby program
• Rubular – test your regex on the fly
• Simile Timeline
• Scraper Wiki
• Snitch.Name – people lookup
• Tableau Public
• TimeFlow
• TinEye finds information on uploaded images, including usage, higher resolutions, modified versions
• Tweeql access the Twitter API by using SQL syntax (requires Python)
• TwitInfo chart Twitter keyword frequency and sentiment
• USA Spending – see what the US government is spending money on
While I don’t have new code to show yet, today I started looking for additional learning resources. Artist Marius Watz is publishing a free series of Processing primers on Modelab. The examples are fully commented, so even if you’re fairly new, it’s easy to follow along.
Daniel’s got tutorials and excerpts from his current book online for those curious about his writing style and looking for additional examples to learn from.
Have some additional sites and sample files you’d like to share? Leave a note and help create a standing resource.
I once knew a business editor who griped a lot about the typical story that would cross his desk: “You’re dazzling people with big numbers instead of telling them anything meaningful!”
My takeaway: Always create context around data.
When most people think of data, they think numbers. But most dictionary definitions define the term along the lines of “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.” Remember that.
As the technical foundation of online journalism moves toward structured, semantic data examined by people with expertise (or at least curiosity), we will probably find ourselves wondering how many people we’re reaching and how it happens.
Site metrics is one way. Another is social network analysis.
Among the interesting tools out there is the Infochimps API, which is currently in beta. On their blog, you’ll see this:
It shows one Twitter user’s network and the connections between them. While the example was produced by someone running a business, it could easily be applied to a journalist interested in understanding their own networks (sources, readers, colleagues, etc.).
Coupling Influencer Metrics with Trstrank would enable a promoter to identify not only the users most likely to engage, but also the most influential of those users. Throw Wordbag into the mix and a promoter could also discover if users in the active, influential target population have a potential interest in their product.
by James A. Davis (recommended by Philip Meyer)
by 
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