While preparing for a SXSWi panel on design research earlier this year, I started thinking about how to engage the audience.
My fellow panelists and I wanted a way for the audience to participate in the discussion so we could … Read more
Editor’s note: This How To assumes a basic understanding of HTML.
Along with HTML and JavaScript, CSS forms the foundation of the open Web. These three technologies power just about every website, and a basic understanding of each can go … Read more
JSON stands for “JavaScript Object Notation,” which makes it sound like an esoteric bit of programming trivia that non-Web developers won’t ever have to deal with.
But JSON is neither esoteric, nor does it have to involve programming. It is … Read more
Election season is upon us. As the presidential candidates work to garner support and funds, journalists are trying to inform and educate voters on the issues and personalities at play in 2012.
Part of our job is to help people … Read more
The first attempt at a lead for this post, it turns out, was pretty much the same lead I wrote five years ago when reviewing a book about dirty data.
My lapse illustrates two things: First, that I have the … Read more
From building apps to backgrounding stories, reporters work with numerical data in all kinds of ways. It’s a practice that will no doubt increase in the future as more data becomes available all the time.
But as anyone who’s tried … Read more
A few months ago, John Keefe wrote a Poynter.org How To about using shapefiles. The power of the shapefile, he wrote, is the ability to refer to regions instead of points.
But what if your data has points (for … Read more
Increasingly, reporters are turning to Microsoft Excel — or similar spreadsheet programs like Apple’s Numbers – to advance their reporting. They’re using spreadsheets to keep track of city budgets, baseball statistics, campaign finance and hospital data.
If you’re not already … Read more
So you want to become a developer, journo-coder or hired geek and you’re wondering where to begin. Maybe you’ve coded a bit before and you’re wondering what languages to choose, or maybe you’ve never seen a piece of code and … Read more
Single page apps are great solutions for data journalism. By offloading the complexity from backends and servers, journalists can build rich programs and graphics out of just Javascript, HTML and CSS. In fact, these “backends” can shrink to a vanishing … Read more