8 items tagged “nicar”
2024
Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR
NICAR was fantastic this year. Alex and I ran a successful workshop on Datasette and Datasette Cloud, and I gave a lightning talk demonstrating two new GPT-4 powered Datasette plugins—datasette-enrichments-gpt and datasette-extract. I need to write more about the latter one: it enables populating tables from unstructured content (using a variant of this technique) and it’s really effective. I got it working just in time for the conference.
[... 1,430 words]NICAR 2024 Tipsheets & Audio. The NICAR data journalism conference was outstanding this year: ~1100 attendees, and every slot on the schedule had at least 2 sessions that I wanted to attend (and usually a lot more).
If you’re interested in the intersection of data analysis and journalism it really should be a permanent fixture on your calendar, it’s fantastic.
Here’s the official collection of handouts (NICAR calls them tipsheets) and audio recordings from this year’s event.
American Community Survey Data via FTP. I got talking to some people from the US Census at NICAR today and asked them if there was a way to download their data in bulk (in addition to their various APIs)... and there was!
I had heard of the American Community Survey but I hadn’t realized that it’s gathered on a yearly basis, as a 5% sample compared to the full every-ten-years census. It’s only been running for ten years, and there’s around a year long lead time on the survey becoming available.
Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR
Next week is NICAR 2024 in Baltimore—the annual data journalism conference hosted by Investigative Reporters and Editors. I’m running a workshop on Datasette, and I plan to spend most of my time in the hallway track talking to people about Datasette, Datasette Cloud and how the Datasette ecosystem can best help support their work.
[... 1,390 words]2023
Weeknotes: NICAR, and an appearance on KQED Forum
I spent most of this week at NICAR 2023, the data journalism conference hosted this year in Nashville, Tennessee.
[... 1,941 words]2021
Weeknotes: Datasette and Git scraping at NICAR, VaccinateCA
This week I virtually attended the NICAR data journalism conference and made a ton of progress on the Django backend for VaccinateCA (see last week).
[... 773 words]Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk
I prepared a lightning talk about Git scraping for the NICAR 2021 data journalism conference. In the talk I explain the idea of running scheduled scrapers in GitHub Actions, show some examples and then live code a new scraper for the CDC’s vaccination data using the GitHub web interface. Here’s the video.
[... 289 words]2019
Publish the data behind your stories with SQLite and Datasette. I presented a workshop on Datasette at the IRE and NICAR CAR 2019 data journalism conference yesterday. Here’s the worksheet I prepared for the tutorial.