The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "Perl" ...
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Inside baseball: What data journalism can learn from sports
This panel will identify areas for data journalism exploration by examining the current state-of-the-art baseball data analysis. Sports are the original form of data journalism -- box scores predate open government movements by about a century. And Joseph Adler's "Baseball Hacks" trained newbie Web CAR reporters how to scrape and analyze data sets using Perl and MySQL. Finally, sports analytics are a leading indicator for other kinds of analysis. Sensors, economic analysis, leverage are all de rigeur in baseball but still up-and-coming in data journalism. We'll take the concepts being used to analyze baseball, football, soccer and apply them to standard data journalism chores.
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Programming: Learn the basic lingo and gain new powers
DeBarros talks about basic programming skills that will unleash a wealth of potential for reporters. He defines a number of programming languages and explains the application of each.
Tags: programming; computer language; C#; JavaScript; Perl; PHP; Python; Ruby; SQL
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Web Scraping
Heath details web scraping. "'Scraping' means extracting data from websites. Thing about any site that lets you search a data set. How much better would it be if you could get the whole thing?" Heath explores the benefits and reasons for scraping, and what tools you'll need to accomplish the task.
Tags: web scraping; data set; database; excel; scripting; Perl; PHP; Ruby; VB; C#; Open Kapow; Yahoo Pipes
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Getting your Intranet Out
Henderson outlines the necessary steps to get an intranet up and running in your newsroom. He also explains the sources to explore if you would like to automate your look-ups.
Tags: intranet; databases; database-enabled server; PHP; Python; Perl; open-source;
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Programming skills: An introduction to Perl and regular expressions
Perry's PowerPoint covers Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language. With a disclaimer that you can't learn Perl in an hour, Perry's presentation aims to provide: a basic understand of the philosophy behind Perl; introduction to Perl syntax; introduction tp basic regular expression syntax; common Perl idioms; common errors; and a list of where to find help.
Tags: Perl; syntax; Practical Extraction and Report Language; UNIX; regular expressions; parsing data;
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Web Scraping: Techniques and Challenges
Johnson discusses how to use Perl to scrape websites for data so you aren't stuck with a tedious cutting and pasting job whenever you look for new data online. She offers examples of scripts that she wrote for this purpose.
Tags: programming language; Perl; data extraction; scripts; computer programing
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Tools for Mining Data from Web Pages
This tipsheet covers the basics of getting data online. It talks a lot about using Perl, HTTP::Recorder and Firefox to find and use the data. The tipsheet also includes a list of other Perl functions as well as a list of resources to help reporters.
Tags: Perl; Firefox; Mechanize Module; code; web browsers; HTML::Toke Parser; Data::Dump; computers; technology
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Snake Charming: A journalist introduction to Python programming
This tipsheet offers a very comprehensive overview of Python, a free scripting language. Nixon explains how it can be helpful to clean data and build simple programs and then gives specific details about how to use it.
Tags: programming; computer language
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Mining the Wb for Data, Part II
How to write a Perl program to scrape data from the web. Takes you through writing the program, creating a browser, creating a directory to save your downloaded files, and saving data in a format which can be imported into a database.
Tags: Perl program; creating a browser; downloading data from the web; databases
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Scraping for Jobs with Perl and WWW::Mechanize
Generally, if a reporter finds a website with a cross-section of useful databases, a long, drawn out process of clicking and downloading inevitably follows. Using the process outlined in this tipsheet, though, that method is out the window.
Tags: Perl