Tools & Resources for Data Journalists

Migrahack Colorado 2016

Helga Salinas / helgalivsalinas@gmail.com / @helga_salinas

Who am I?

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

I've worked for Univision and NPR producing visual and interactive stories.

At GOOD Magazine, I worked as a Data Visualization and Infographics Editor.

And, most recently, I worked at the Los Angeles Times as a Social Media Producer.

Who are you?

Where do you work?

What would you like to learn in this session at Migrahack?

Our session:

Learn about tools and resources for finding data, visualizing data and building web interactives. This workshop will introduce you to data portals, scrapping data, data visualization tools and JavaScript tools for journalists.

H/T SF Chronicle's Lucio Villa

Tools for this session

• Chrome or Firefox
• Gmail
• Sublime
• Your Project (Download)

What's Github?

An Updated Awesome list of Public Datasets

An updated list of powerful publishing tools for immersive, beautiful web journalism

Melody Kramer's Github tutorials and resources for journalists

NPR, Vox, Quartz, Mother Jones, KnightLab

Obtaining & Visualizing Data

Census Reporter

An open source tool that helps reporters navigate data and information from the U.S. Census Bureau.

http://censusreporter.org/

More data resources:

American Fact Finder

Pew Research

Data Portals

Portals are collections of freely available data and tools. They provide data dashboards on various topics containing tables, charts and maps.

A large number of cities, counties and states have open data sites.

data.gov

data.opencolorado.org

Chartbuilder

An open source tool that visualizes data in static graphics. It's become

http://quartz.github.io/Chartbuilder/

Download data

Example data

Scraping data

Example data: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

Google Spreedsheet (Tutorial)

import.io

More resources on data visualization & journalism:

Atlas by Quartz

Storybench

Data Journalism Handbook

Public Affairs Data Journalism by Dan Nguyen, Stanford Journalism Lecturer

Web Interactive Tools

StoryMap.js

StoryMap.js is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events.

You’ll need Gmail because it is an app that will connect to your Google Drive. There’s a PDF in the .zip folder you downloaded from GitHub titled “Storymap.js.” It has the assets that you’ll need to create this interactive. After you’ve finished, press “Publish changes” and then press “Share.” There, you will find the Embed Code to include it in your final_project html page.

Lets try it: StoryMap.js

Timeline.JS

Timeline.js is an open-source tool that allows publishers to quickly and easily create interactive, media-rich timelines using nothing more than a Google Spreadsheet.

You’ll need Gmail because you’ll be using Google Spreadsheets. There’s a PDF in the .zip folder you downloaded from GitHub titled “Timeline.js.” It has the assets that you’ll need to create this interactive. After you’ve finished, you will use the Embed Code to include it in your final_project html page.

Lets try it: Timeline.js

Juxtapose.js

Juxtapose.js helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and gifs.

There’s a PDF in the .zip folder you downloaded from GitHub titled “Juxtapose.js.” It has the assets that you’ll need to create this interactive. After you’ve finished, copy and paste the lines of code from under the section “Publish the slider” onto your final_project html page.

Lets try it: Juxtapose.js