[Guest post by Dave Riordan, Product Manager, NYPL Labs]
Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting and speaking at the incredible Hacks/Hackers NYC meetup, a collective of some of the most talented and interesting folks in New York with a bent toward building a better-informed citizenry through journalism, technology and design. They welcomed us and we fit right in.
Rather than have myself and Ben Vershbow do our traditional dog-and-pony show (that poor, poor pony), the entire Labs team got up on stage to share some of our most interesting projects and technical investigations, several of which were shown for the first time.
SuperPACs. Drones. Gerrymandering. Dark Money. How do you quickly illustrate these concepts in a way that is meaningful and impactful to an audience of different education levels and cultural backgrounds? That was the challenge set out before a group of 60 volunteers at the February Hacks/Hackers NYC Investigative Journalism Iconathon led by The Noun Project in partnership with ProPublica.
Journalists, editors, graphic designers, web developers and engaged citizens brainstormed and sketched ideas for icons frequently needed throughout news editorials and applications.
Since the start of Hacks/Hackers in 2009, we’ve heard from lots of people interested in the ways journalists and developers can help each other push what’s possible at the intersection of news and technology.
So we’re very pleased to kick off 2012 with the new version of Help by Hacks/Hackers, a forum for you to ask and answer any practical, forward-looking, and philosophical questions about news and media work.
Hacks/Hackers’ first annual hack day at ONA11 brought journalists and developers together to make ideas real. We built on the success of last year’s Hacks/Hackers @ ONA hack day by bringing about 45 people together in Boston. They showed up with data sets; reporting, analysis and coding skills, and a willingness to collaborate on a wide variety of ideas. In the end, ad hoc teams hatched seven projects, of which the judges gave awards to four.
In an era of “show, don’t just tell,” data visualization in journalism has become an increasingly important component of news reporting.
Alastair Dant, interactive lead at The Guardian in London, joined Hacks/Hackers NYC on Sept. 19 for a presentation on his team’s work in reporting stories with big datasets.
Jeremy Caplan, Education Director at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, compiled notes from Alistair’s talk.
The Guardian first explored aggregate analysis and data visualization last year with an award-winning graphic that replays World Cup games, condensing 90 minutes of tweets into 90 seconds of interactive animation.
Brighton, England’s Hacks/Hackers kickoff event starts today with a great lineup planned. Better yet, Hacks/Hackers Brighton will be live streaming the talks at Journalism.co.uk around 3:30 BST (10:30 a.m. ET/7:30 a.m. PT or check your local time)
You can also follow along on Twitter at #hhbtn.
Scheduled speakers include:
Tom Hume and James Hugman from Future Platforms, showing Guardian Anywhere, an unofficial Guardian app for Android Robert Douglas from Ribot, who will demo a yet-to-be-released HTML5 Web app for mobile powered by the Guardian API Laura Oliver, community coordinator at the Guardian, who will show how Ushahidi-powered Crowdmap was used during clean up after the riots.
For the second year in a row, Hacks/Hackers and The Poynter Institute are offering one full scholarship (a $895 value!) to attend Building News Applications With Data, a three-day seminar in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Apply with this Google form.
The seminar takes place Aug. 17-19, 2011. Faculty includes Hacks/Hackers co-founder Aron Pilhofer of The New York Times; John Keefe of Senior Executive Producer for News at WNYC, New York Public Radio; and Matt Waite, professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and designer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact at the St.
Journalists, developers and designers:
Join Hacks/Hackers for Hacks/Hackers Hacking @ ONA11 in Boston on Sept. 22!
We’re holding a hack day sponsored by Knight-Mozilla News Tech Partnership and additional partners (to be announced) the day before Online News Association annual conference general sessions.
Meet new people, make new friends and prototype projects with code, wireframes and websites at the Microsoft NERD Center. What we produce together at the all-day hackathon will help shape the future of news and civic information.
BlogWorld & New Media Expo will be in New York from May 24 to May 26, and Hacks/Hackers is offering members 20% off registration.
tl;dr, Updated:
Register for BlogWorldExpo with discount code HHVIP20 to get 20% off all registration rates. Register by April 14 to get the lowest price. Full details about the conference and exhibitors can be found on the BlogWorld & New Media Expo website.
The longer version:
When WikiLeaks released the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, news organizations and the public alike sprang into action to understand the documents.
The New York Times was instrumental in analyzing and reporting the story in articles, photographs, maps and graphic information.
Meanwhile, several local hackers worked on their own data visualizations and were featured soon after on Wired, NPR and the New York Times.
RSVP now to join Hacks/Hackers NYC on March 9 at New Work City to learn how the analyses were done, the importance of independent validation checks on data, and see further examples of their work.