Cheryl Phillips of The Seattle Times and Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital presented on how to fit your data to the appropriate presentation style. Just like when you’re shopping for clothes, you should ask a lot of questions before you buy (or in this case, before you spend resources designing anything).

What is the story in the data? What kind of data is it? Aggregated or individual records, for example. How much data do you have?  How much time do you have? Resources? How granular do you want to get? Is there a geographic component?

Don’t stress over ...

Google Crisis Response created this interactive map showing weather, emergency shelters and power authorities.
 

As the East cost braced for Hurricane Sandy, data journalists across the country were working in realtime to spread the news. We gathered some of the interesting interactive coverage and data visualizations we found from around the web. Have a suggestion for our list? Send it to tony@ire.org or tweet us @IRE_NICAR.

• Timothy Barmann of the Providence Journal put together these maps and graphics tracking power outages in Rhode Island.
• Simon Rogers and John Burn-Murdoch created this interactive for The Guardian Data Blog showing ...

The story started as a hand-me-down from my colleague Bill Lueders, the Center’s Money and Politics Project director. He got a year’s worth of Gov. Scott Walker’s official calendars then gave them to me, the data geek.

Sure, the records included that well-publicized February 2011 prank call from a blogger who was pretending to be David Koch, a major campaign supporter. But that wasn’t a narrative. There were no Mark Sanford-like sallies; there were a lot of redactions. Our colleagues at the Wisconsin State Journal, writing about these same records, had largely focused on their sparseness ...

On the way back to the airport after a grueling week at the the IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting boot camp last year, I spotted a dead deer. Anyone who has been to the boot camp or even a NICAR or IRE conference knows that your head is swimming with ideas and possibilities. After a week of boot camp I was seeing spreadsheets and SQL code in my sleep. I wondered who, if anyone, tracked roadkill.

When I returned home, I did a pointed web search for information about roadkill records in Washington state. One of my first hits was ...

By Daniel Hom
Tableau Public

Many journalists have experienced leafing through stacks of documents, searching for important numbers to back up stories and trying to relay all of that in a way that captivates readers. It’s a world where too often multimedia means simple graphs and interactivity a time-consuming Adobe Flash graphic.

I know these experiences because they were my own when I worked in the journalism industry. I’m a bit of a numbers nerd, but I also love telling stories. I often struggled ...

The web now offers numerous free tools that give non-programmers the ability to create data-driven applications. Among those with the most promise, especially for journalists, is Google Fusion Tables.

Fusion Tables essentially is a free database manager in the cloud, allowing anyone to upload large data sets, merge them with other tables and create visualizations. It’s much more, though. The service has a detailed application programming interface (API), and basically can serve as a free back end to serve data and mapping applications. The service also is customizable while simple, with extra capabilities for more experienced users.

Of course ...