From intricate interactive maps to stunning visualizations, news organizations like The New York Times and Washington Post make data come alive for readers. Join Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), in partnership with Hacks/Hackers, for NewsCamp on Feb. 24 in Raleigh, N.C., and you too can learn from the best in the business — whether you’re a rank beginner, or experienced designer/developer.
This daylong workshop will tackle subjects ranging from storytelling without words to best practices and emerging technologies.
Update: RSVP now for the Hacks/Hackers Holiday Fête on Dec. 20 at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO! Doors will open at 7 p.m. Crave will be catering the evening.
Thanks very much to our sponsors: Gawker Media, Scribd, Soundnote, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and Nearsay.
We’re still looking for some help. Contact us if:
Your business wants to sponsor the evening You’re a video DJ who wants to take advantage of Galapagos’s projection setup You want to donate prizes of assorted, sundry lots You’d like to meet the Hacks/Hackers community by volunteering at the door You’ve got other cool ideas to integrate into the party Let us know at nyc[at]hackshackers.
(Photo of the Hacks/Hackers NYC meetup at OpenPlans by Dan Nguyen/Flickr)
You asked for the slides from Justin Osofsky’s Facebook for publishers presentation, and we’ve got ’em, along with statistics.
Working Together to Build Social News
We’ll have notes from the meetup in a bit…
Since time immemorial, two major knowledge management questions have bedeviled news organizations. First, when faced with a giant pile of primary source material, how does a reporter intelligently and efficiently discover the newsworthy bits? Second, how should the organization index and expose the latest news and archival material to both consumers and reporters?
To answer these questions, Lotico the New York Semantic Web and Hacks/Hackers teamed up on Sept. 30 to have speakers from ThomsonReuters, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Aol News present on their work in Computer Assisted Reporting. Turnout was tremendous with most people showing up despite the fact that the event was free.
The lineup:
— Ken Ellis, Proposition Leader at Thomson Reuters;
— Stuart Myles, Deputy Director of Schema Standards at The Associated Press;
— Tom Torok of The New York Times;
— Maurice “Mo” Tamman of The Wall Street Journal;
— Justin Cleary, Senior Product manager at Aol News
Thanks to the 80-some of you who came to the Hacks and Hackers NYC meetup July 14. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback about the event. We’d love to hear your ideas for future talks about the intersection of journalism and technology. Leave a comment or email us at nyc[at]hackshackers[dot]com.
So on to it.
Nick Diakopoulos, a post-doc research associate at Rutgers University, talked about his work on turning data into information graphics games. One example is Salubrious Nation, which challenges players to guess the public health of a communities nationwide based on county demographics.
Another is Vox Civitas, which analyzed Twitter messages posted during President Obama’s State of the Union address. Graphing keywords on a chart showing time and message volume and adding a tweet window revealed interesting patterns. For instance, Nick and his colleagues noticed a spike about 28 minutes into the president’s speech. Turns out air force bases issued a burst of tweets as he spoke about funding for military family support. Search on the keyword “military” to see for yourself.
