IRE executive director Mark Horvit and training directors Jaimi Dowdell and Megan Luther offered advice this morning for how to make the best use of the conference. For first-time attendees, here are a few basic things to keep in mind:

There are three types of sessions: panels, demos and hands-on rooms.

Panels follow a fairly traditional conference format. A speaker or a group of speakers discusses a topic and perhaps field some questions. This morning's panels include "Information design and crossing the digital divide," "Getting Started: Digging deep with data journalism", and "Exploratory Data Analysis". There are three panel ...

By Dan Hill

The hands-on workshops at last year's conference blew me away, and I hope to leave Louisville with exposure to new tools I can put to use in the newsroom. Although technology is always changing and this year's tools may soon be obsolete, there are some skills workshops I don't want to miss.

My NICAR goal is to grasp Django well enough to pitch and lead a feasible newsroom project. The four Python sessions should help.

Northwestern friends and I are known to #RallyForR, so expect to see us with pom poms listening to Amanda ...

By Wendell Cochran

For me, the NICAR conference is one of the highlights of the year. I have attended nearly every one since the first in Raleigh in 1993. Over the years, my roles have changed, but NICAR remains helpful to me. These days I don’t go so much to learn new skills or even to polish my old ones, but mostly to stay abreast of the new directions CAR and its practitioners are headed.

At the past two conferences, among the most entertaining and informative sessions have been the lightning talks organized by Derek Willis and Aron Pilhofer ...

By Derek Willis

The first eight or 10 NICARs that I attended, I went heavy on the skills-based sessions, learning specific software from experienced users. As I've gravitated towards a (relatively) compact set of everyday tools, I find myself at more thematic sessions that dig deep into a specific problem or approach.

One of the things that I love to do when deciding one my NICAR conference schedule is to separate sessions into "new" and "new-to-me" categories. In the past several years NICAR has seen an explosion of sessions about topics that have barely been covered before, from natural ...

By Kate Martin

I am really looking forward to this year’s NICAR conference. I started my data training in 2011 with IRE at a week-long CAR boot camp. These days I regularly use Excel and Access in my reporting for the Skagit Valley Herald, a daily with five newsroom reporters.
 
After last year’s hands-on sessions on Tableau Public, I immediately put my education to use to map a state carcass removal database for a story about roadkill in Washington state. 

I intend to improve my mapping skills by attending classes on how to use ArcGIS. I see an ...

A year or two ago, thanks to Hacks/Hackers, IRE and the University of Missouri, I became really interested in how I can use data and technology to make me a better reporter. I’ve made some progress since then, but at the end of the day, I’m still a beginning reporter who is looking for tools I can use. Here are some sessions I’m planning to take advantage of at NICAR next month:

• Sessions that I will walk out of with a list of tools I can start using immediately, like “Dig deeper with social tools” and ...