Stanford students write a review of data tools

NICAR is adding a review of data tools to its online resources, courtesy of Stanford journalism students. 

Nineteen journalism and computer science students paired up in a new, 10-week data journalism class with the goal of exploring how programming techniques can assist in investigative reporting. The students analyzed documents and data in various formats, from PDFs to messy Excel spreadsheets. 

After 10 weeks of experimenting with a myriad of data tools, the team wrote up their experience as a guide for others, covering various techniques from web scraping to mapping to visualization. They discuss pros, cons and opinions on how easy each program or software package is to use.

Check out their review here: https://www.ire.org/nicar/database-library/stanford-review-tools/