With a housing market once dubbed “ground zero” for mortgage fraud, Atlanta is still very much in the midst of the foreclosure crisis.

Even the nicest neighborhoods have been hit hard; the anecdotal evidence is everywhere. In poorer neighborhoods, entire blocks are deserted.

We initially had envisioned a series of reports quantifying the number of abandoned homes in a five-county area and explaining the reasons these houses sit neglected.

We brainstormed about which records would indicate a house had been abandoned.  We requested past due utility bills, code enforcement violations and unpaid property taxes. In Microsoft Excel, we built individual ...

The Baltimore Sun’s investigation of red light cameras over the past year prompted changes to the system a city task force to study the cameras, a lawsuit and draft legislation. Though officials have refused to credit the paper’s reporting for the policy changes, the Sun’s findings exposed wrongful tickets -- including idling vehicles cited for moving violations -- that the city is now working to ...

If you’re working from a Mac computer or getting into truly large datasets, Access may not be a viable option as a database manager. (It doesn’t work on Macs, and there are row limitations.) A good alternative is MySQL, an open-source database manager, which Alex Richards of the Chicago Tribune taught on Friday.

MySQL essentially installs a server that runs in the background on your computer. But if you don’t really understand what that means, don’t let it scare you. There are a handful of secondary applications that let you interface with MySQL in a way ...

Using tabletop.js, one editor and two researcher, presenter Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones got the remarkable 47% graphic online for Mother Jones in under five hours. If that’s not reason enough for you to try tabletop.js, consider this: Raja says Tabletop has been an absolute “game changer” for the Mother Jones newsroom. 

Think of tabletop.js as a javascript library that gives legs to spreadsheets. For now, Raja has settled on a simple protocol to deploy it: Reporters populate a Google spreadsheet with data that can include text, links, images or videos. Once it’s fact-checked, the ...

After teaching a full day of data science during NewsCamp on Thursday, Hadley Wickham on Friday morning presented a brief introduction to data science called “Data science for the perplexed. For everyone.”

Wickham is an Assistant Professor at Rice University and working for RStudio. He describes himself as a statistician by training, and tried to offer some insight into the buzzword that is “data science.” 

He first cited the unofficial and often used description: “a blend of red bull-fueled hacking and espresso-inspired statistics." He also referenced this often-used venn diagram.

Data science isn’t just about hacking with big data ...

A CAR conference atendee throws a ball down the lane on Thursday night in Louisville. Photo by Travis Hartman, IRE/NICAR.

Stephanie Peuriere from Strasbourg University bowls at the after hours bowling event on Thursday night in Louisville. Photo by Travis Hartman, IRE/NICAR.

This three-part series  moderated by Brant Houston of the University of Illinois walks through a data-driven story, from interviewing the data to proving the story to your editor to telling it to your audience.

Using a database (available from the NICAR data library) of government-backed loans from the Small Business Administration, a group of reporters and editors around the country worked together remotely in the days leading up to NICAR. In addition to some insights and promising questions about the data itself, they pulled together lessons and documented their process for reporting out a data-driven story.

Part 1: The approach ...

Google Fusion tables has a new look.

You can learn how to use it with Google Fusion Tables tutorials, and get a grip on how to import map data, and style, filter and share your creation with the world.

Learn step-by-step how to formulate “lots of points” maps, heat maps and intensity maps.

Some other cool tools: Fusion Tables Layer wizard to add custom layers, and shpescape to dump shapefile (like what you use in ArcGIS) into a Fusion table.

Geolocation tools help you search for social media activity buzzing in your beat, on your block and even in your building. The following tools help you search by geolocation information embedded in tweets, Facebook updates, youtube videos and more.

“Geolocation is one of the most exciting things for journalists out in the field,” presenter Doug Haddix said.

Some sweet tools:

• Ban.jo lets you see the exact location of updates and tweets – great for scaring your friends at cocktail parties.
• Mappeo is a YouTube geo-search, which allows you to see videos posted in a certain area. Search “Sandy near New ...

I walked into the Tableau Public session with absolutely no experience -- and within about 10 minutes the instructor had us open up some data, sort through a few of the elements, and create a visualization.  Its immediate ease of use is clear. To produce quick, coherent interactive charts seemed pretty easy.  The further we went along though; it became apparent that there was some serious horsepower under the hood.  And with great power comes responsibility.  More on this later.

Our instructor, Mike Klaczynski, started with the proper way to format data for Tableau, and in the ...