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 "collecting data" ...
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Battling data price tag inflation
Webster and McNeill provides concrete advice on how to deal with institutions and potential setbacks and hindrances when requesting data.
Tags: data collection
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Creative Uses of Webscraping
Todd gives insight in the field of data scraping (programmatic extraction of human-readable output) and specifically goes into the possibilities of webscraping.
Tags: data; collection; scraping; webscraping
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Integrating CAR
Dowdell and Wert gives advice on the importance of collecting data and the benefits of setting up independent databases, and offer tips on specific subpoints to cover under topics such as Sports, Crime/Public Safety, Education, Business, etc.
Tags: data; databases; investigative methods
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Jigsaw
Stasko's powerpoint describes Jigsaw - a program created to "help 'investigators' explore, analyze and understand large document collections." It helps to create connections between documents that help to shape/understand the larger story. Jigsaw provides multiple visualizations for the documents, entities and their connections.
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Text Visualization
Stasko's powerpoint explores several different methods to visual text. He also discusses the use of Jigsaw (Visualization for investigative analysis across document collections)
Tags: data visualization; word cloud; jigsaw; many eyes; phrase nets; TextArc; theme river; TIARA; PaperLens;
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Census 2010: Story Ideas
A collection of story ideas that go beneath the surface of the 2010 Census data.
Tags: diversity index; segregation index; dissimilarity; census;
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Tweets telling stories; Tweets as data
Marcus explores how twitter can be used to aid in telling stories and collecting data thru the use of tools such as TwitInfo and TweeQL.
Tags: twitter; tweets; SQL; TwitInfo; TweeQL; data; storytelling; structured queries;
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Education Beat Tool Box
This tipsheet outlines how data helps you cover the education beat; what materials you have a legal right to; what data is collected; who works for the schools; where the money goes; and other "must see" documents.
Tags: education; data; databases; schools; students; teachers; private schools; charter schools
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Data on Deadline
Benincasa's powerpoint lists several strategies for using data on deadline. He includes story examples with an explanation of the data used in each. He also addresses "readiness strategies" and "geek notes" - tips to help manage an utilize the data you've collected.
Tags: data; deadline; beat reporting; mapping; MySQL; queries; database library; database organization
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Finding/Negotiation for Data
Doig discusses things to remember when making data requests. His tips include: "find out what information is being collected", "befriend the agency's data guru", and "get all the data you can." Each tip includes a detailed explanation.
Tags: data negotiation; sunshine laws; public records; FOIA