Taking CAR 2011 home

There is plenty to take home from the CAR Conference, whether or not you made it to Raleigh, N.C. The four-day conference offered hands-on training of new analytical resources, along with dozens of other tips for journalists. With so much information, it's good to take the next few weeks to process it all. IRE staff members will be collecting tipsheets from all conference speakers. Tipsheets from Raleigh can be found here. In addition, there are several resources on the Web from the conference:

• Conference blog: Students from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication blogged about several panels at the conference. The posts explain the sessions and offer links to additional resources.
• 13 free tools to analyze, display data: Arizona State Professor Steve Doig writes up his "Best of CAR" from the conference, including open-source tools useful for journalists.
• MoJo goes to NewsCamp: Wishing you had made it to the conference? Phillip Smith's three-minute video walks you through the conference.
• Data Visualization Tools, Slides and Links from NICAR11: Chrys Wu, an organizer of Hacks/Hackers, compiled many of the slides and hand-outs available online. Her post covers a range of tutorials, including Google Refine, Excel pointers and coding tips.

This is just a small portion of the many great presentations from the conference. Be sure to check the tipsheet database in the coming weeks as more presentations are added. Got some resources you’d like to share? Send them to our Resource Center (tipsheet@ire.org) or message us on Twitter (@ire_nicar). Don’t forget the IRE conference in Orlando is coming up in June, and we've already started planning for next year's CAR Conference in St. Louis. Please send us your thoughts.