NICAR 2022 conference schedule

Thursday, 3/3

Sessions starting at 8:15 a.m. ET

special IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

👋 Hello, world! Choose your data adventure

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 8:15 – 8:45 a.m. ET (m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Welcome to the conference! Hear about tips and tactics to navigate our conference like a pro. Also, you'll learn about key resources that IRE offers once you're back home.

Speakers

Diana Fuentes, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Simone Weichselbaum, NBC News Investigations 👇

Simone Weichselbaum is a national investigative reporter for NBC News, focusing on local and federal law enforcement issues. She previously was a police reporter for The Marshall Project, the New York Daily News and the Philadelphia Daily News. She holds a graduate degree in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania.

On Twitter: @simonejwei

Cody Winchester, IRE & NICAR 👇

Cody Winchester is the senior training director at IRE & NICAR.

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 1: Intro to R and RStudio

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Jump into data analysis with R, the powerful open-source programming language. In this class we’ll cover R fundamentals and learn our way around the RStudio interface for using R.

This session is good for: People with a basic understanding of code who are ready to go beyond Excel.

Speaker

Lucia Walinchus, Eye on Ohio, the Ohio Center for Journalism 👇

Lucia Walinchus is an award-winning journalist, attorney and ice hockey addict. She is currently the Executive Director at Eye on Ohio, the Ohio Center for Journalism. Walinchus has written more than 500 articles for various publications throughout her career and was named a 2016 Fulbright Berlin Capital Program Scholar. She has been featured as a guest speaker on CNN and is a contracted freelancer for The New York Times.

On Twitter: @SoSaysLucia

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

PDF 1: Using free online tools

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

This class will cover basic approaches for getting text out of PDF documents using powerful and freely available tools. Participants will be introduced to basic concepts and walked through tackling common challenges encountered with tricky PDF documents.

This session is good for: People who are unfamiliar with PDF-to-text tools or would like to learn how these tools can be used for extracting difficult text from images embedded in a PDF document.

Speaker

Maggie Mulvihill, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Finding needles in haystacks with fuzzy matching

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

Fuzzy matching is a process for linking up names that are similar but not quite the same. It has become an increasingly important part of data-led investigations as a way to identify connections between public figures, key people and companies that are relevant to a story. This class will cover how fuzzy matching typically fits into the investigative process, with some story examples.

Max Harlow, who developed the CSV Match command line tool, will show you how to run some of the different types of fuzzy matching on some real datasets, including the pros and cons of each.

This session is good for: People who feel comfortable using the command line.

Speaker

Max Harlow, Financial Times 👇

Max is part of the visual and data journalism team at the Financial Times in London, where he focuses on using data to find and tell investigative stories.

On Twitter: @maxharlow

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 1: Getting started with spreadsheets

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

In this introduction to spreadsheets, you'll begin analyzing data with Excel, a simple but powerful tool. You'll learn how to enter data, navigate spreadsheets and conduct simple calculations like sum, average and median.

This session is good for: Data beginners.

Speaker

Hurubie Meko, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Command line for reporters (Mac)

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

Too often in data journalism we forget about the basics. And it doesn't get as basic as the command line. Even knowing a little will make your job easier. We will run through some simple commands, dive into working with spreadsheets and show you some handy tools he frequently uses at work.

This session is good for: People who feel intimidated by the command line on their computer, but want to explore the power of command line tools.

Speaker

Will Craft, APM Reports 👇

Will Craft is a data reporter for APM Reports and the podcast In The Dark.

On Twitter: @craftworksxyz

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Mastering Google Sheets: Web scraping, running scripts and other tricks (morning class)

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Lobby level)

⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $35 to reserve a seat. Note: You must purchase an in-person conference ticket before you can buy a ticket for this session.

Description

Google Sheets is more than just free spreadsheet software to organize and store data. This hands-on session will start with pivot tables and conditional formatting, and through examples, we'll also learn how to scrape data in seconds without code, automate menial tasks with macros, write custom spreadsheet formulas as well as how to send emails, geocode addresses, translate text and more – all through the power of Google Sheets. Come with a laptop and leave with the knowledge of a Google Sheets power user.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. You must bring your own laptop (no tablets) to this training and have a Google account.

Workshop prerequisites: You should be familiar with using spreadsheets and formulas.

Speaker

Frank Bi, Vox Media 👇

Frank Bi is a journalist, engineer, educator and nonprofit leader based in New York City. He is a journalist at Vox Media, an adjunct graduate professor at Fordham University and a senior leader at the Asian American Journalists Association. Frank has trained thousands of journalists, students and other professionals on finding information on the internet and on topics such as data literacy and data journalism.

On Twitter: @frankbi

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

First Python Notebook

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET (480m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

⚠️ This session requires pre-registration and an additional fee of $70 to reserve a seat. Note: You must purchase an in-person conference ticket before you can buy a ticket for this session.

Description

Kae Petrin, Melissa Lewis, Andrea Suozzo and Ben Welsh guide you through a six-hour, hands-on investigation of money in politics.

You will learn:

* just enough Python to execute an analysis with pandas, one of the most popular open-source tools for working with data tables

* how to record, remix and republish your work using Jupyter, a browser-based tool emerging as the standard for reproducible research

* and how these tools can increase the speed and veracity of your journalism.

Along the way you’ll conduct your own investigation of California campaign donors using the California Civic Data Coalition’s open-source database archive.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided.

Prerequisites: If you've tried Python once or twice, have a good attitude and know how to take a few code crashes in stride, you are qualified. We want you.

Speakers

Melissa Lewis, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Kae Petrin, Chalkbeat 👇

Kae is a data and graphics reporter on Chalkbeat's data visuals team, where they collaborate with local reporters to tell data-driven stories about education. Previously, Kae wrote for St. Louis-based radio and print publications. They have created graphics, built newsroom-wide tools, and produced investigative reporting. Kae co-founded the Trans Journalists Association in 2020 with a collective of transgender and nonbinary media-makers.

On Twitter: @kaepetrin

Andrea Suozzo, ProPublica 👇

Andrea Suozzo is a news apps developer at ProPublica, where she works on Nonprofit Explorer, builds databases and creates graphics. In her free time, she runs, reads, cooks and plays the fiddle.

On Twitter: @asuozzo

Ben Welsh, Los Angeles Times/Big Local News at Stanford University 👇

Ben Welsh is a visiting data journalist at Stanford. He is leading a partnership between the university's Big Local News program and the Los Angeles Times, where he has worked for 14 years. Originally from Swisher, Iowa, Welsh served as a graduate assistant at NICAR's database library in 2005 and 2006.

On Twitter: @palewire

master class: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Master Class: Editing the data story

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: A705 (Atrium level)

Description

Managing a data project presents challenges for any editor. No matter your comfort level with data, this half-day workshop will give you the foundation you need to help make sure your reporters aren’t running with scissors or spinning their wheels on data projects. Veteran editor, Jennifer LaFleur with special guest appearance from Maud Beelman, will guide you through the ins and outs of data journalism from an editor’s point of view, including:

* How to help reporters find focus for their data stories

* Being skeptical of data and finding potential pitfalls

* Verifying analyses and bulletproofing data stories and apps

* Using data to find human sources and characters for stories

* Planning the best data workflows for your newsroom

No data experience is necessary for this workshop. Editors/producers and those interested in newsroom management are welcome. Please bring your own laptop.

Speaker

Jennifer LaFleur, Center for Public integrity 👇

Jennifer LaFleur is an editor at The Center for Public Integrity.

On Twitter: @j_la28

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How to use investigative techniques to hold algorithms and artificial intelligence accountable

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Algorithms are everywhere, but journalists believe companies who built AI-powered tools too much. When journalists use investigative methods to test the tools themselves, many AI products underperformed, or let to dangerous and discriminatory outcomes. In this panel, we will discuss what methods journalists can use to hold AI accountable.

Speakers

Surya Mattu, The Markup 👇

Surya Mattu is a Brooklyn-based investigative journalist, artist and engineer and who looks at the ways in which algorithmic systems perpetuate systemic biases and inequalities in society. Currently he works as an investigative data journalist/senior software engineer at The Markup.

On Twitter: @suryamattu

Hilke Schellmann, NYU/Freelance Reporter for MIT Technology Review and The Guardian 👇

Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy-award-winning journalism professor at New York University and a freelance reporter investigating artificial intelligence for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review and The Guardian. She is currently writing a book on artificial intelligence and the future of work for Hachette.

On Twitter: @hilkeschellmann

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Elections 2022: How to track online political messaging and ads

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

It's primary season! Learn how to make the most of resources to help you cover online campaigns to influence opinion.

Speakers

Sarah Bryner, OpenSecrets 👇

Sarah is responsible for overseeing OpenSecrets' data analysis and research collaborations. Previously, she was OpenSecrets' lobbying and revolving door researcher. Prior to joining OpenSecrets, Sarah was a doctoral student at the Ohio State University, where she also taught undergraduate political science courses. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State in 2014 and her B.A. in political science and biology in 2006.

On Twitter: @aksarahb

Jeremy Merrill, The Washington Post 👇

Jeremy Merrill is a data journalist covering the tech industry at The Washington Post. He lives in Atlanta. He's obsessed with online ads and using AI for newsgathering.

On Twitter: @jeremybmerrill

Nancy Watzman, Lynx LLC 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Data deep dive: Disinformation

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Go behind the story of a data-driven investigation that exposed thousands of propaganda videos denying Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, China.

Reporters used Google Cloud Vision, natural language processing and advanced scraping techniques to find and verify these videos. Learn about all the steps taken of this project from conception to final product.

Speakers

Jeff Kao, ProPublica 👇

Jeff Kao is a computational journalist at ProPublica who uses data science to cover technology. His project on videos posted to Parler during the Capitol riots was cited as evidence throughout former President Trump’s second impeachment hearing. His collaboration with the New York Times on Chinese government censorship of the coronavirus outbreak was a part of their winning entry for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

On Twitter: @jeffykao

Aaron Krolik, The New York Times 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. ET

commons IN-PERSON ONLY

An AI tool to help you sort through your FOIAs | Networking: Reporting on AI and with machine learning

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

10:45-11:15 | Tired of going through FOIA emails on Saturday nights in which you have to read about people just endlessly re-scheduling meetings and lunches until you get to the good stuff? Worry no more - we built an AI tool to help with this! We previewed our tool, Gumshoe, that can help you classify your text data into relevant and irrelevant buckets, at IRE last year. We are now implementing the tool into MuckRock's DocumentCloud platform - a tool that will be accessible to everyone. Please join us if you want to learn more about the tool and how to get a small grant to help us use the tool "in the wild."

We encourage you to stay a bit longer to also join an AI networking session to expand your community and learn about new opportunities.

11:15-noon | Are you interested in using machine learning for your reporting project? Or wondering how to investigate algorithms that make life-changing decisions? Come and meet others who are interested in reporting on and with AI to expand your community and learn about new grants and fellowship opportunities in this fun and informal networking session. We encourage you to come 30 minutes earlier to also learn about an exciting AI tool that can help you sort through FOIAs.

Speakers

Michael Morisy, MuckRock 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Hilke Schellmann, NYU/Freelance Reporter for MIT Technology Review and The Guardian 👇

On Twitter: @hilkeschellmann

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Web development 1: HTML and CSS

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

Curious about building things for the web? This session will introduce you to the principles of HTML and CSS as you learn how different components work together to create the finished web page rendered by your browser.

This session is good for: Beginners who don't mind working through the (often frustrating!) process of learning to code.

Speaker

Alana Pipe, Financial Times 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 2: Data analysis and plotting

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

We'll use the tidyverse packages dplyr and ggplot2, learning how to sort, filter, group, summarize, join, and visualize to identify trends in your data. If you want to combine SQL-like analysis and charting in a single pipeline, this session is for you.

This session is good for: People who have worked with data operations in SQL or Excel and would like to do the same in R.

Speaker

Olga Pierce, The Trace 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

OpenRefine for powerwashing your data

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A702 (Atrium level)

Description

Learn how to use OpenRefine, a powerful tool for quickly cleaning up dirty data. You'll learn about faceting, simple clustering, applying common data transformations and more.

This session is good for people with basic experience working with data.

Speaker

Susie Neilson, The San Francisco Chronicle 👇

Susie Neilson is a data journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work focuses primarily on crime, housing, domestic migration and the coronavirus pandemic.

On Twitter: @susieneilson

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Finding racial disparities in education through data

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

Data is crucial in understanding the disparities in opportunities and outcomes for students of color in K-12 education. Especially now that we have data to analyze that will help us understand how the pandemic disproportionately impacted districts with majority non-white students and the growing popularity of a ban on conversations about racism, data on absenteeism, student engagement, digital access and enrollment can lead to important stories about the experience of students of color in public schools. In this session, students will learn where to find data on educational disparities, how to begin analyzing it and what the steps following data analysis should be.

This session is good for: People with basic Excel skills

Speaker

Eesha Pendharkar, Education Week 👇

Eesha Pendharkar is a reporter for Education Week covering race and opportunity in K-12 schools across the country. Eesha works with national and state level education data as part of her beat.

On Twitter: @Eeshapendharkar

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 2: Formulas & sorting

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

Much of Excel's power comes in the form of formulas. In this class, you'll learn how to use them to analyze data with the eye of a journalist. Yes, math will be involved, but it's totally worth it! This class will show you how calculations like change, percent change, rates and ratios can beef up your reporting.

This session is good for: Anyone who is comfortable navigating Excel.

Speaker

Ryann Grochowski Jones, ProPublica 👇

Ryann Grochowski Jones is the data editor at ProPublica. Previously, she was a data reporter at ProPublica and at Investigative Newsource/KPBS in San Diego, California. She received her master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where she was a data librarian for IRE/NICAR. Ryann started her career as a municipal beat reporter for her hometown newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

On Twitter: @ryanngro

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How to get data through state records laws

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

This seasoned group of reporters will cover the basics (and beyond) of gathering data for your story. See what you need to know about the records laws in your state, tips for crafting a successful request, ways to organize and track pending requests, how to fight for rejected records and, if all else fails, workarounds for gathering data yourself when recordkeepers take too long or say no.

Speakers

Jodie Fleischer, NBC4 WRC 👇

Jodie Fleischer is an investigative reporter with NBC4 in Washington, DC. She specializes in enterprising results-driven stories, with particular interest in exposing government waste, corruption, and mismanagement. She’s earned several of journalism’s top honors including a duPont-Columbia Award, an IRE Award, and numerous regional Murrow and Emmy awards. She is currently serving her second term on IRE's Board of Directors.

On Twitter: @jodienbc4

Steve Garrison, Post and Courier 👇

Steve Garrison covers breaking news and public safety for the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. He’s a native of Chicago who previously covered courts and crime in Wisconsin, New Mexico and Indiana. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Missouri.

On Twitter: @SteveGarrisonDT

Dan Schwartz, Independent journalist 👇

Dan Schwartz is an independent journalist who writes about the environment and outdoors for national publications such as The Atlantic and Outside Magazine. He is also a producer on an investigative podcast for iHeartRadio that'll be out this fall.

On Twitter: @CODanSchwartz

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Getting the most out of census data

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

More numbers are coming from the 2020 census, but using them will be tricky due to the effects of the pandemic and other issues. We’ll walk you through what's available, what's coming and how to use it all and avoid newbie mistakes. We'll do the same for other Census Bureau data that will soon let you document local effects of the pandemic as well as paint a portrait of your community in other stories across a range of beats.

Speakers

D'Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center 👇

Dee is a senior writer/editor at Pew Research Center, mainly focusing on demographics, and manages the Center’s work on the U.S. census, including the @allthingscensus Twitter account. She covered the same topics in a previous 21-year career as a Washington Post journalist. Since 2019, she has organized and taught at Poynter Institute workshops that have trained hundreds of journalists how to find and use census data in stories.

On Twitter: @allthingscensus

Paul Overberg, The Wall Street Journal 👇

Paul Overberg is a data reporter at The Wall Street Journal and a member of its investigative team. He worked on USA TODAY’s data team for many years and led its demographic coverage. He has taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and served as a senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California. The 2020 census isn't his first.

On Twitter: @poverberg

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

A roadmap for editors

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Editors don’t need to know how to navigate a spreadsheet or other data tools to be a good champion of data-driven work, but there are some key ways they can help find, manage and edit data-driven stories. This session will provide a roadmap you can take back to your newsroom to train editors, and MaryJo Webster will talk about how she has used that training in her newsroom.

Speaker

MaryJo Webster, Star Tribune 👇

MaryJo Webster leads the data team at the Star Tribune, where she has worked for nearly 7 years. She is also a senior fellow with the Center for Health Journalism's Data Fellowship. Previously, she worked for USA Today, the Center for Public Integrity, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

On Twitter: @MaryJoWebster

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Transforming the accessibility and transparency of federal courts

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

Working with data from the judicial system is notoriously challenging, from antiquated information practices to minimal if any obligation to comply with records requests. In this panel, representatives of two projects aimed at making federal court data easier to access and analyze will talk about general issues journalists should know and provide a bit of an introduction to their tools.

Speakers

Charlotte Alexander, Georgia State University 👇

Charlotte Alexander holds the Connie D. and Ken McDaniel WomenLead Chair as an Associate Professor of Law and Analytics at the Colleges of Business and Law at Georgia State University. She uses computational methods to study legal text, with a particular focus on understanding how courts process and resolve employment disputes and other types of civil lawsuits.

Joe Germuska, Northwestern University Knight Lab 👇

Joe Germuska is the Chief Nerd (Executive Director) of Northwestern University Knight Lab, the media/technology/design studio at the Medill School of Journalism. He is also the founder and project lead for Census Reporter, a service to make US Census data easy for journalists. Before Knight Lab, Joe was, among other things, a founding member of the News Applications team at the Chicago Tribune.

On Twitter: @JoeGermuska

Mike Lissner, Free Law Project 👇

Michael Lissner is the Executive Director of Free Law Project, the nonprofit that hosts RECAP, CourtListener, and other services aimed at improving the judicial branch. He is a recipient of the PAGI award from the American Association of Law Libraries, a FastCase 50 winner, and has advised the Chilean judiciary on their modernization efforts. At Free Law Project, he has provided PACER and judicial data to numerous media and research organizations.

On Twitter: @mlissner

Sessions starting at 2 p.m. ET

commons IN-PERSON ONLY

How to make your data work visible and respected in your newsroom

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

It's heartbreaking that after all these years, there are still plenty of newsrooms - even among the largest around, let along in smaller markets - that treat their data team and/or data journalists as a "service desk." Not thinking of them, nor treating them, as full "reporters" equal to those who write words on the page. Join this conversation to participate in helping those struggling in such a situations

Speakers

Alexander Cohen, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Aaron Kessler, Associated Press 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

demo IN-PERSON ONLY

Streamline your data collection process with AP Harvester

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Manually collected datasets can be some of the most illuminating – but they are also hard to collect. You can’t always predict the perfect data structure and you have to adapt; everyone involved has to enter data consistently to end up with something usable; and, often, you’re doing all this on deadline.

This class will introduce AP Harvester, an open source, collaborative data collection platform designed to streamline manual data collection in the newsroom. Andrew Milligan, the lead developer of AP Harvester, will show you how to get started with the tool on a new project.

This session is good for: People interested in data collection who are familiar with Google Sheets.

Speaker

Andrew Milligan, The Associated Press 👇

Andrew Milligan builds tools and visuals for the newsroom at The Associated Press, bringing to life projects that help with everything from data collection to interactive development to templated text generation. He holds a Master of Computer Science from the University of New Mexico and is project lead and core maintainer for AP Harvester.

On Twitter: @andmilligan

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Web development 2: Introduction to JavaScript

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

📝 Description coming soon!

Speaker

Sam McAlilly, DataMade 👇

Sam McAlilly is a developer at DataMade. He's contributed to collaborative journalism and investigative projects, including The Circuit and the Illinois Public Salaries Database. He specializes in front-end development. He particularly enjoys mapping and data visualizations. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 3: Gathering and cleaning data

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Learn how to use R to scrape data from web pages, access APIs and transform the results into usable data. This session will also focus on how to clean and structure the data you've gathered in preparation for analysis using tidyverse packages.

This session is good for: People who have used R and have a basic understanding of how to retrieve data from APIs.

Speaker

Sean Mussenden, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism/Univ. of Maryland 👇

Sean Mussenden is data editor of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, a non-profit investigative reporting unit based at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism that partners with professional news organizations. He is also a senior lecturer of data and computational journalism at the school.

On Twitter: @smussenden

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

PDF 1: Using free online tools (repeat)

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: People who are unfamiliar with PDF-to-text tools or would like to learn how these tools can be used for extracting difficult text from images embedded in a PDF document.

Speaker

Maggie Mulvihill, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 3: Filtering & pivot tables

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

A look at the awesome power of pivot — and how to use it to analyze your dataset in minutes rather than hours. We'll work up to using a pivot table by first sorting and filtering a dataset, learning how to find story ideas along the way.

This session is good for: Anyone familiar with formulas, sorting and filtering in Excel or another spreadsheet program.

Speaker

Adrian Garcia, Financial Times/Money Media 👇

Adrian D. Garcia is the associate editor of data visualization at Money-Media, a unit of the Financial Times. He previously was a data reporter and analyst for Bankrate in New York and covered business, trends and other news stories for Denverite.com, the Fort Collins Coloradoan and other news organizations in Colorado.

On Twitter: @adriandgarcia

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Mastering Google Sheets: Web scraping, running scripts and other tricks (afternoon class)

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 5 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Lobby level)

Description

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. You must bring your own laptop (no tablets) to this training and have a Google account.

Workshop prerequisites: You should be familiar with using spreadsheets and formulas.

Speaker

Frank Bi, Vox Media 👇

On Twitter: @frankbi

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Intro to R

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 5 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: A702 (Atrium level)

Description

We'll introduce you to R, a free, powerful open-source programming language that will take your data reporting to the next level. By the end of this three-hour session, you will be able to read data from common file types into R, clean and explore it, create visualizations, and make your entire data workflow reproduceable. We'll also talk about how to find help when you're stuck.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided for the training.

Workshop prerequisites: This session will be most helpful if you’re comfortable working with data and you’re ready to take your skills to the next level.

Speaker

Charles Minshew, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

Charles Minshew is the digital storytelling editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping journalists tell stories with data and digital tools. Charles is the former director of data services for IRE, where he trained hundreds of journalists from around the world. He previously worked for the Orlando Sentinel and was part of the The Denver Post staff that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2013.

On Twitter: @charlesminshew

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Mobile and desktop data reporting tools

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Mike Reilley of the Journalist's Toolbox shares some of the best mobile apps and desktop reporting tools for data-driven stories. The workshop will offer product demos, exercises and handouts with links to the tools, training videos and other resources. Mike is always available after the session to answer questions and help with any issues attendees have. Follow him on Twitter @journtoolbox or visit his site at http://journaliststoolbox.org

Speaker

Mike Reilley, University of Illinois Chicago 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Finding data to tell stories for historically marginalized communities

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Don’t settle for “it can’t be done” or "I don't have any sources in that culture." Although some undercovered communities might seem a mystery, they don't have to remain that way. This session will discuss how to blend diverse voices and sources of data into your stories, and cover hard-to-reach communities, such as those filled with older and more recent immigrants, some who may not have much experience with the media, minority communities who are often fearful of the repercussions of speaking with media, and others.

Speakers

Alejandra Cancino, City Bureau 👇

Alejandra Cancino is the Deputy Editor at City Bureau, a Chicago-based nonprofit journalism lab reimagining local media. Cancino leads a team of reporters and City Bureau's Civic Reporting Fellowship. Previously, she was a senior investigative reporter at Better Government Association where she exposed systemic failures in local government. Earlier in her career, she was as a business reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

On Twitter: @WriterAlejandra

Mary Hudetz, ProPublica 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Kate Sosin, The 19th* 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Creating a pipeline to management: Retaining and cultivating equitable spaces for a diverse newsroom

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Diversity is not just about numbers. It's about listening to all voices, and making your newsroom a place where opportunity and growth are accessible to that talent pool. In this session we'll discuss how newsroom leaders can recruit, retain and cultivate diverse talent, as well as how to clearly define and enact DBEI policies.

Speakers

Nicole Carr, ProPublica 👇

Nicole Carr is reporter with ProPublica, covering criminal justice, racial inequity and the pandemic. Carr also developed and teaches a social justice journalism course at Morehouse College. Prior to ProPublica, Carr was an investigative reporter with WSB-TV where she earned four Southeast Regional Emmy awards. Carr is an active member of NABJ, IRE, the Atlanta Press Club and the Ida B. Well Society, where she serves as a trainer.

On Twitter: @NicoleFCarr

Justin Myers, The Associated Press 👇

Justin Myers is the data editor at The Associated Press, where he supports a team of data journalists distributed around the United States. Previously, he worked on newsroom tools, interactive graphics and data reporting projects for AP, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and the PBS NewsHour. He holds degrees in both engineering and journalism, and he lives in Chicago.

On Twitter: @myersjustinc

Mc Nelly Torres, Center for Public Integrity 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sessions starting at 3:45 p.m. ET

demo IN-PERSON ONLY

Big Local News: What our data and tools can do for you

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

The Big Local News team specializes in building tools for journalists and obtaining hard-to-get data. We also offer a free platform for storing and sharing data at biglocalnews.org. Come learn about our current projects mining city council agendas, layoff notices, police use-of-force and misconduct files, evictions, school enrollment, COVID-19 trends and the 2020 Census. Our mission is to help local journalists better cover their community. We are excited to hear about what you are working on and how we can help.

Speaker

Irena Hwang, ProPublica 👇

Irena Hwang is a data reporter at ProPublica. She previously worked at National Public Radio, The Associated Press and The Dallas Morning News. She has a master’s degree in journalism and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On Twitter: @irenatfh

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Web development 3: Introduction to JavaScript build tools

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

📝 Description coming soon!

Speaker

Andrew Briz, POLITICO 👇

Andrew Briz is a Newsroom Applications Architect at POLITICO where he designs and develops tools and product prototypes. He has created award-winning products like Congress Minutes and worked with the Interactive News team to create comprehensive election suites for the past three cycles. You can often find him in the News Nerdery JavaScript channel on Slack where he's happy to talk shop or on GitHub where he maintains a few open source tools.

On Twitter: @brizandrew

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Indexing your database for faster queries

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

Are the queries you've written for your giant database slow as molasses? Come to this session to learn how indexing and other techniques can give you a speed boost -- bring your SQL tuning questions!

This session is good for: People with experience using databases.

Speaker

Brandon Roberts, Independent journalist 👇

Brandon Roberts is an independent data journalist with a focus on open source software development and applying computational techniques to watchdog journalism. He is located in Washington State.

On Twitter: @bxroberts

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 4: Advanced Pivot Tables

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

You've done a few pivot tables and are getting curious what more you could do with them. What happens if you aggregate by more than one column? What are those "column" and "filter" boxes for? Come unlock the full potential of pivot tables in this intermediate spreadsheet class.

This session is good for: People familiar with spreadsheets and aggregating data with pivot tables, or anyone who has taken Excel 1-3.

Speaker

Janelle O'Dea, St. Louis Post-Dispatch 👇

I'm a data reporter in St. Louis with a focus on housing, public pay and criminal justice

On Twitter: @jayohday

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Data of divides

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Doing data-driven inequality stories often means using statistical tools. This will be a quick overview of some of the key tools available in R.

This session is good for: People who have basic R skills.

Speaker

Jennifer LaFleur, Center for Public integrity 👇

Jennifer LaFleur is an editor at The Center for Public Integrity.

On Twitter: @j_la28

networking IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Code buddies: Get help on your project (virtual)

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

Description

Have some data and ideas but you're not sure what to do next? Trying something new you learned at NICAR and need someone to doublecheck your math? The Lonely Coder's Club* and OpenNews want to help you get past whatever's blocking your next data or code project. This session will be run remotely via Zoom.

If you let us know a little about your project in advance, we'll reach out to some peer experts who have just the right experience to help you out.

* The Lonely Coder's Club is a Slack community of newsroom data nerds and programmers who run solo or on small teams.

Speakers

Allie Kanik, Houston Chronicle 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Ryan Pitts, OpenNews 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Why (and how) you should include public lands, tourism and Indigenous issues in your climate change coverage

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Public lands visitation is skyrocketing across the country and the fight over land is boiling along with the environment, while locals and Native Americans are caught in the middle.

Now, your climate change coverage is incomplete without including data on public lands, tourism and Indigenous issues – no matter if you’re an urban or rural reporter.

We’ll give you the data and angles (with aspects of solutions journalism, local news and accountability) to conquer issues like economic impacts, social justice, government accountability, cultural conflicts, environmental challenges and beyond around these topics. Plus, why this is all so important with examples of real impact!

Speaker

K. Sophie Will, The Spectrum/USA Today/Report for America 👇

K. Sophie Will is the National Parks Reporter for The Spectrum & Daily News and USA Today through Report for America by the GroundTruth Project. The Draper, UT-native graduated from Boston University in 2020 with bylines found in the Deseret News, the Boston Globe, AP, Thomson Reuters, HuffPost, WGBH and more.

On Twitter: @ksophiewill

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Quick-turn data story ideas

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

We’ve all disappeared down the data rabbit hole on occasion or become embroiled in huge projects. But what about data stories that need a fast turnaround? This session will cover tips for getting stories out quickly and keeping clarity along the way.

Speakers

Greta Kaul, MinnPost 👇

Greta Kaul is the data reporter at MinnPost, a nonprofit news outlet covering public policy, arts and culture in Minnesota. Before coming to MinnPost, she was a Hearst fellow at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. She likes to use data to help people better understand what's happening in the news.

On Twitter: @gretakaul

Jill Riepenhoff, Gray TV 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Managing big data for investigating disaster emergency and recovery processes

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

There are tons of data around climate disaster issues, but finding methodologies to identify great stories is a real challenge. First, you have to deal with discrepancies between state data and federal data. Then, analyzing and interrogating the data, other than sorting for traditional angles, and even crossing databases or relating one information to other databases seems to be a real challenge. Join this panel to learn how to think through your disaster coverage.

Speakers

Jeremy Finley, WSMV 👇

Jeremy Finley is a two-time IRE award winner who serves as the chief investigative reporter at WSMV-TV.

On Twitter: @jfinleyreports

Ren Larson, The Texas Tribune & ProPublica investigative unit 👇

Ren Larson is a data reporter with The Texas Tribune + ProPublica's investigative team. Previously she was a data journalist with the Arizona Republic, a city planner, a case manager and a data analyst. Ren’s work has been recognized by the MIT Knight Science Journalism's Victor K. McElheny award and was a finalist for the Philip Meyer and Gerald Loeb awards. She's a fan of rock climbing, bicycling and cooking.

On Twitter: @renLarson_

Carla Minet, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo 👇

Carla Minet is the executive director and editor of Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. Her investigative work ranges from political campaign donations to environmental issues and government affairs. For the past 20 years she worked as a reporter, researcher, editor and producer for radio, television and online.

On Twitter: @carlaminetpr

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How to tell compelling data stories on podcasts and in video

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

How do you reach new audiences in podcasts and video - media that don't lend themselves to data-heavy stories? This panel will cover best practices on how to do hard-hitting investigative reporting AND tell a compelling story, no matter your audience or medium.

Speakers

Jessica Jaglois, University of Memphis 👇

Jessica Jaglois is a Murrow-award winning, Emmy-nominated investigative journalist and visiting professor at the University of Memphis. Jessica has primarily spent her career in local TV news where her work has consistently led to systemic change. Her series on excessive force complaints helped lead to new processes and oversight in Memphis. Jessica teaches data journalism, investigative reporting and broadcast news. She is an NYU grad and originally from Metro Detroit.

On Twitter: @JessicaJagsTV

Angelina Mosher Salazar, Sonoro Podcast 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Hilke Schellmann, NYU/Freelance Reporter for MIT Technology Review and The Guardian 👇

On Twitter: @hilkeschellmann

Sessions starting at 5:15 p.m. ET

networking IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Virtual networking and welcome

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

📝 Description coming soon!

Speaker

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism/Grand Valley State University 👇

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is the founder and executive of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and the Padnos/Sarosik Endowed Chair of Civil Discourse at Grand Valley State University. His work has been published in The New Yorker and the Center for Public Integrity, among many publications, and has earned national and international recognition. A Fulbright Scholar, Specialist and Teacher, he has written or edited six books.

On Twitter: @JeffKLO

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Students

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for journalism students.

Speakers

Claudia Chiappa, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Eleanor McCrary, University of Missouri 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Shwetha Surendran, Boston University 👇

I'm Shwetha Surendran. Currently, a journalism graduate student at Boston University and a reporter/development producer for Blue Wire Studios, a sports podcasting company. In my spare time, I read, and get unnecessarily competitive at board games.

On Twitter: @UsernameShwe

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Mid career

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for mid-career journalists.

Speakers

Jodie Fleischer, NBC4 WRC 👇

On Twitter: @jodienbc4

Marisa Kwiatkowski, USA TODAY 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Educators

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for journalism educators. All levels of experience welcome.

Speakers

Jennifer LaFleur, Center for Public integrity 👇

Jennifer LaFleur is an editor at The Center for Public Integrity.

On Twitter: @j_la28

Maggie Mulvihill, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Early career

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for any journalist, educator or student in the early years of their career.

Speakers

Nicole Carr, ProPublica 👇

On Twitter: @NicoleFCarr

Josh Hinkle, KXAN 👇

Josh Hinkle is KXAN’s director of investigations and innovation, leading the Austin station’s duPont and IRE Award-winning investigative team on multiple platforms. He also leads KXAN's political coverage as executive producer and host of “State of Texas,” a weekly statewide program focused on the Texas Legislature and elections. He serves on the boards of both IRE and the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and teaches broadcasting at St. Edward's University.

On Twitter: @hinklej

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Career veterans

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for journalists who have been in the field 15 years or more.

Speakers

Jennifer Forsyth, The Wall Street Journal 👇

Jennifer Forsyth is Deputy Chief of Investigations at The Wall Street Journal. She managed a collaboration with PBS’s Frontline on poor health care provided by the U.S. Indian Health Service, which won the Worth Bingham Award for Investigative Journalism in 2020 and was an Emmy finalist for Outstanding Investigative Documentary. She edited stories that were part of the Journal’s coverage of Trump’s hush money that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Cindy Galli, ABC News 👇

Cindy Galli is Executive Producer of ABC News’ award-winning Investigative Unit in New York. She oversees a team of network correspondents, reporters and producers specializing in investigations ranging from government fraud and corporate corruption to racial injustice, consumer and environmental issues. She serves on the board of directors of IRE, where she has been a member since 1994. A longtime consumer investigative reporter, Cindy is a San Francisco Bay Area native and proud Berkeley alum.

Sessions starting at 6 p.m. ET

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Welcome reception

🕙 Thursday (3/3) • 6 – 7:30 p.m. ET (90m)

🚪 Room: Atrium A (Atrium level)

Description

Join us for our welcome reception on Thursday, beginning at 6 p.m. Reconnect with longtime friends and welcome new attendees! Each attendee will receive one drink ticket for beer, wine, soda or bottled water. Light snacks also will be served.

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

Friday, 3/4

Sessions starting at 7:45 a.m. ET

special IN-PERSON ONLY

Mentor program breakfast (invite only)

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 7:45 – 8:45 a.m. ET (m)

🚪 Room: Atrium A (Atrium level)

Description

If you signed up for the conference mentor program, come meet your match at this invitation-only breakfast.

The mentorship breakfast is sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

SQL 1: Exploring data

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

Learning to manipulate data is a bit like learning a new language. Actually, it is a language, called Structured Query Language (SQL). This session is an introduction to using SQL to zero in on your data by viewing slices and chunks of it and putting it into a useful order so you can spot the stuff you need to get started toward a story. We'll use DB Browser for SQLite, a free database manager.

This session is good for: People with some experience working with data in columns and rows, in spreadsheets or database managers.

Speaker

Jack Gillum, Bloomberg News 👇

Jack is a cybersecurity correspondent for Bloomberg News, based in Washington, D.C. Previously, he reported for ProPublica, The Washington Post and The Associated Press, where he wrote on social media firms, national politics and government surveillance; and for USA Today, where he pursued data-driven investigations into standardized test cheating and college athletics. Jack began his career as a business reporter at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson

On Twitter: @jackgillum

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R: Introduction to statistics

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Statisticians need to really understand their data (and so do you!) before they begin running analyses. As a result, stats software like RStudio has many powerful tools to summarize your data. You're going to love them. We'll take a look at the structure of data in RStudio, do data transformations and run some basic statistical tests.

This session is good for: People who have familiarity with Excel and some database software. We've got a *lot* of ground to cover in this hour.

Speaker

Holly Hacker, Kaiser Health News 👇

Holly Hacker is the data editor at Kaiser Health News. Before that Holly worked at The Dallas Morning News, most recently as an investigative reporter focused on health care, education, housing and data analysis. She's based in Dallas for now but moving to the DC area this summer.

On Twitter: @hollyhacker

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Advanced PDF processing with OCR and command-line tools

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

This class seeks to help you solve a common problem in journalism: Data stored in a computer generated PDF -- or, worse, an image PDF. We'll first walk through how extract text from a computer-generated PDF using a command line tool. Then we'll step up to Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, to work on image files.

This session is good for: People with experience using their computer's command-line interface.

Speaker

Chad Day, The Wall Street Journal 👇

Chad Day covers national politics for The Wall Street Journal and teaches data journalism at Georgetown University.

On Twitter: @ChadSDay

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Mapping for analysis and online display

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

If you work with data in a newsroom, sooner or later you will need to analyze geographic data and use the results display in a map.

Join us for this half-day session where we’ll cover intermediate mapping skills with QGIS and Mapbox. During this session, you’ll learn key analysis and visualizations techniques by beginning an investigation into how Atlanta’s housing market has been effected by COVID.

We’ll cover tools, workflows and best practices to help you transform public data into compelling maps and narratives that you can reuse on your own markets. This workshop will specifically address:

* Calculating points in polygon

* Creating hexbins

* Using QGIS for visual analysis

* Exporting geographic data for interactive display

* Importing geographic data into Mapbox

* Mapbox Studio: Styling by data and UI

* Mapbox iframes, and their limitations

* Intro to mapboxgl (including example code)

Workshop prerequisites:

* Participants should have some familiarity with QGIS to get the most out of this class. If you have never used QGIS, reviewing these introductory documents will be helpful.

* Participants should also have already signed up for a free Mapbox account.

Speaker

Allie Kanik, Houston Chronicle 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

First GitHub scraper

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

Iris Lee, Aadit Tambe and Ben Welsh guide you through a three-hour, hands-on introduction to free, automated web scraping with GitHub’s powerful new Actions framework.

You will learn how to:

* Create a GitHub repository to store your code online

* Write just enough Python to scrape a simple data file

* Configure GitHub Actions to schedule the scrape

* Log the results to the repository and make it publicly accessible

* Send a Slack notification when new data is logged

Prerequisites: Sign up for a free GitHub account prior to the class. If you have a good attitude and know how to take a few code crashes in stride, you are qualified. We want you.

Speakers

Iris Lee, Los Angeles Times 👇

Iris Lee is an assistant editor for data and graphics, specializing in news applications.

On Twitter: @irisslee

Aadit Tambe, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism 👇

Aadit Tambe is a fellow at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, and a second-year master’s student in data journalism at the University of Maryland. He has committed his career to explaining the news through data analysis and interactive graphics. Most recently, Tambe interned at NBC News on the data and graphics team. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism, along with a German minor, from the University of Iowa.

On Twitter: @aadittambe

Ben Welsh, Los Angeles Times/Big Local News at Stanford University 👇

On Twitter: @palewire

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Interviewing your data with SQL

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 a.m. – 6:15 p.m. ET (555m)

🚪 Room: A702 (Atrium level)

Description

If you flip over pivot tables, but wish you had more data tools, this session is for you. Structured Query Language, or SQL, can help you use powerful filtering functions, find patterns in millions of records and join multiple data tables.

This class will be full of exercises, cheat sheets and tips to help you boost your data analysis and storytelling skills. We will use a free database manager that can be easily installed and used on any computer.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided for the training.

Workshop prerequisites: The only prerequisites are a reasonable comfort level with using a spreadsheet. No previous SQL skills necessary.

Speakers

Stephanie Lamm, The Houston Chronicle 👇

Stephanie Lamm is a data journalist on the investigative team at The Houston Chronicle. She regularly uses Excel, SQL, R, and mapping in her work. She is currently reporting on mental health care through a grant from the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Stephanie previously worked for the Dallas Morning News and graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On Twitter: @stephanierlamm

Jennifer Peebles, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Digging into Data

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (1620m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

Get started using data in your stories with IRE's mini-boot camp. In this 6-hour, hands-on workshop, IRE’s experienced trainers will start with the basics of navigating Google Sheets and using formulas, then walk you through sorting, filtering and aggregating data with pivot tables to find story ideas.

You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your newsroom, including how to find and request data, identify and clean dirty data, find story ideas and bulletproof your work.

We’ll also provide you with our detailed boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference.

Workshop prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this workshop and beginners are welcome. This workshop is good for those wanting to get started analyzing data for stories.

Pre-registration is required and seating is very limited to allow for social distancing. You must bring your own laptop (no tablets) to this training and have a Google account.

Speakers

Patti DiVincenzo, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Liz Lucas, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Cody Winchester, IRE & NICAR 👇

Cody Winchester is the senior training director at IRE & NICAR.

master class: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Master Class: Statistics

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: A705 (Atrium level)

Description

Statistical methods can help you go beyond counting, sorting and filtering data to look at relationships, make predictions and level the playing fields. Statistical analyses can provide hard evidence to back up (or discredit) a theory. This master class will help you understand the concepts and methods most often used by journalists, including:

* Linear regression

* Correlation

* Statistical significance

* Describing and visualizing your data

This master class is aimed at those already familiar with basic data analysis using spreadsheets and ready to add statistical analysis to their toolkits.

Please bring your laptop to the training. Before the conference, please install R and R Studio (free, open-source software) on your computers.

Speakers

Sarah Cohen, Arizona State University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Norm Lewis, University of Florida 👇

Norm Lewis is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Florida, where he has been since getting his doctorate in 2007. Before that, he was a journalist for 25 years, ranging from editor of smaller dailies to The Washington Post financial desk. In addition to creating five data journalism courses at UF, he conducts statistics-based social science research into news culture for peer-reviewed journals.

On Twitter: @bikeprof

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Records and data to request right now

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

📝 Description coming soon!

Speakers

Jill Castellano, inewsource 👇

Jill Castellano is an investigative data reporter for inewsource in San Diego. Jill graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian. She has worked for The New York Daily News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Desert Sun and USA TODAY. She shared a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2018 for her project that counted the deaths of undocumented border crossers.

On Twitter: @jill_castellano

Stephen Stock, NBC Bay Area 👇

A founding member of NBC Bay Area's 15-member Investigative Unit as well as a founding reporter of the I-Unit at WESH-TV and member of CBS4's I-Unit in Miami, Stephen has won just about every broadcast journalism award out there. He's won a Peabody, a duPont, a national SPJ, 3 Murrow and 6 Associated Press awards as well as 18 regional Emmys and a national Emmy nomination. He's taught at IRE conferences for more than a decade.

On Twitter: @stephenstocktv

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Following the money in Pandora Papers

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

For nearly two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists organized and led the Pandora Papers investigation that grew to encompass more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories. The data reporting team scoured the 11.9 million leaked documents and disentangled the labyrinthine ownership networks behind countless companies, foundations and trusts, tracing the dirty money flows across borders. Reporters followed leads to a cliffside mansion in California, a sugar plantation in the Dominican Republic, a polluting factory in Italy, high-rise towers in Dubai and a Turkish hospital where workers alleged mistreatment. In this session, journalists from the project will show you how they used the leaked data to trace money across borders, including a special inside look at how to use ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database.

Speakers

Miranda Patrucic, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Delphine Reuter, International Consortium of Journalists 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Margot Williams, Freelance 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Broadcast: Data stories that don't look like data stories

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

How to sell and tell data-heavy broadcast stories, from convincing skeptical managers that viewers will stay with the story to story-telling devices that will help viewers follow the data trail.

Speakers

Josh Hinkle, KXAN 👇

On Twitter: @hinklej

AJ Lagoe, KARE11 👇

A.J. Lagoe is an investigative reporter for KARE 11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis, MN. During his time at KARE, A.J.’s reporting has led to criminal convictions, sparked numerous Congressional and state legislative hearings, and prompted new federal and state laws. His investigations have earned him many of journalism’s highest honors including an IRE, George Polk, and three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards.

On Twitter: @AJInvestigates

Tisha Thompson, ESPN 👇

Tisha appears on all ESPN platforms, including SportsCenter, OTL, E:60, SCFeatured, espn.com and The Daily podcast, regularly translated into multiple languages for ESPN’s international sites. A member of ESPN’s Peabody winning team for “Spartan Secrets,” she received several national awards for hosting “Being Believed: A Conversation with Sister Survivors,” and is the recipient of more than 100 other awards and honors, including 24 regional Emmy and 15 regional Murrow awards.

On Twitter: @TishaESPN

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Best practices when teaching a data course

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Data and data viz courses in colleges and universities have taken off at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Join this session of veteran educators to learn and share best practices and ideas for effective teaching of data courses.

Speakers

Matt Carroll, Northeastern University School of Journalism 👇

Matt Carroll is a journalism professor of the practice at Northeastern University. Previously he ran the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Before that, he worked for 26 years at the Boston Globe, specializing in data storytelling. He was a member of the Spotlight team, the newsroom’s investigative unit, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 for its coverage of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal.

On Twitter: @Mattcdata

Brant Houston, University of Illinois 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism/Grand Valley State University 👇

On Twitter: @JeffKLO

Jennifer LaFleur, Center for Public integrity 👇

Jennifer LaFleur is an editor at The Center for Public Integrity.

On Twitter: @j_la28

Cheryl Phillips, Stanford University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. ET

commons IN-PERSON ONLY

Giving back: How to be the best mentor you can be

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

📝 Description coming soon!

Speakers

Jodie Fleischer, NBC4 WRC 👇

On Twitter: @jodienbc4

Cindy Galli, ABC News 👇

Brian Rosenthal, The New York Times 👇

Brian M. Rosenthal has been an investigative reporter on the Metro Desk of The New York Times for the last five years. Before that, he worked at The Seattle Times and then the Houston Chronicle. He won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series of stories exposing predatory lending in the New York City taxi industry, and he was part of the Seattle Times team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News. He serves on IRE’s Board of Directors.

On Twitter: @brianmrosenthal

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

SQL 2: Grouping and summing data

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

If you know how to write a basic SELECT statement in SQL but are looking to make calculations, then this is the session for you. Learn to count how many times certain records appear in a database, and sum totals across records. These skills can come in handy whether you're covering campaign finance or boating licenses. We'll use SQLite and DB Browser, a free database manager.

This session is good for: People who took “SQL 1: Exploring data” or are familiar with “SELECT” and “WHERE” statements in SQL.

Speaker

Pam Dempsey, Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R: Advanced dataviz techniques

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Overwhelmed by numbers? We’ll show you how to quickly find patterns with bar charts, boxplots, scatterplots and maps. Along the way, we’ll also discuss ways to make interactive charts and visualize error margins.

Speaker

Aaron Kessler, Associated Press 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Maximizing utility – a pragmatic reporter’s philosophy on data analysis

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

Get it done efficiently. We’ll focus on the optimal use of data skills for impactful reporting. That means exploration vs. exploitation, vetting a minimum story and hypothesis testing – or at least probing whether things that look odd to you are superlative or representative. Some technical talk, some broader ideas, hopefully a lot of healthy debate.

Arizona Republic investigative reporter Andrew Ford will share his approach honed by years trying to produce enterprise work while covering cops for local newspapers and his time with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

This session is good for: Early-career reporters who want to chase big stories while keeping their editors happy, as well as seasoned pros who too often find themselves lost in the weeds (you’re not alone).

Speaker

Andrew Ford, Arizona Republic 👇

Andrew Ford is an investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic. As part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network at the Asbury Park Press, he published projects on police unions, one recognized as a Livingston Award finalist and another chosen as an IRE/NICAR Philip Meyer Award winner. His Twitter is @AndrewFordNews and he’s happy to take questions and partner on stories: aford@arizonarepublic.com.

On Twitter: @AndrewFordNews

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Hitchhiker's guide to APIs

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Lobby level)

Description

In this hands-on session, you'll learn the ins and outs of working with APIs, which allow computers to exchange information and serve as your doors to the latest weather data, crypto prices, vaccination rates, and other useful (and playful!) data sources. We'll cover API basics, getting data from public APIs, using an API key, and navigating other authentication methods. After this session you'll walk away with tools and code you can use to dig deeper into your city's open data portal, use free and commercial data sources, and even trigger things to happen in the "real" world. Best of all, you'll be excited — not intimidated — when you see that a company or service has an API.

Note: You will need a Google account for this session.

This session is good for: Everyone. We'll be working with tools non-coders can appreciate, and running "playable" code you won't have to write yourself.

Speaker

John Keefe, CNN 👇

John Keefe is a senior data and visuals editor at CNN. Previously he was a graphics/multimedia editor at the New York Times, the investigations editor at Quartz, and head of the Quartz AI and bot studios. Keefe established and ran the WNYC Data News Team and led the station's news division for nearly a decade. Keefe also teaches at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

On Twitter: @jkeefe

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Life at 50C : Finding the news story in climate data

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

📝 Description coming soon!

Speakers

Becky Dale, BBC 👇

Becky Dale is a data journalist with the BBC in London, where she specialises in data-led stories on climate change and international events. She produces graphics and interactive content for her stories, which have been published by dozens of BBC World Service languages.

On Twitter: @becky_dale

Nassos Stylianou, BBC News 👇

Senior data journalist with BBC News, finding stories from complex datasets and visualising them online. Nassos has been editorial lead on a number of the most successful and award-winning BBC projects, often using innovative storytelling formats and techniques.

On Twitter: @nassos_

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How to sensitively uncover issues and amplify voices in the Arab community

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

There are nearly 3.5 million Arabs in the United States, yet this group is often underrepresented or unfairly portrayed in mainstream media coverage. So how do we thoughtfully and intentionally report on a community that is a core fabric to many major metropolitan cities and states across the country? Two Arab-American journalists will walk you through how, despite little data available, they successfully build trust, track down stories and highlight the voices of an often stereotyped and disenfranchised community in their reporting and storytelling.

Speakers

Fahiemah Al-Ali, CNBC 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Samah Assad, CBS Chicago 👇

Samah Assad is an award-winning investigative journalist and producer with CBS Chicago. She uses data analysis and public records to expose systemic failures and government corruption. Her areas of focus include reporting on police abuse, sexual assault, racial inequities and taxpayer waste, as well as giving a platform to voices in historically disenfranchised communities.

On Twitter: @sassadnews

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Exposing inequities in housing

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

This workshop is for people interested in using data to deepen their coverage of housing, whether for their main beat, a side beat or long-term project. We'll discuss the information they should request from local and federal agencies, courts and elsewhere to uncover accountability stories on eviction, zoning, infrastructure and more. Attendees will learn to go beyond the typical trend stories to find stories that create impact, no matter where they are.

Speakers

Juan Pablo Garnham, Eviction Lab 👇

Juan Pablo is Audience and Community Engagement Editor for Eviction Lab. Previously, he has covered urban affairs for the Texas Tribune, CityLab, Univision and El Diario in New York, and produced the Futuro Media podcast In The Thick. He has also taught Journalism at CUNY and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

On Twitter: @jpgarnham

Willoughby Mariano, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

Willoughby Mariano is an investigative reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she focuses on housing and criminal justice issues. She recently completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where she studied concepts of housing, home and identity. Past honors include a National Headliner Award in investigative journalism and the Atlanta Press Club’s award for civil and human rights reporting.

On Twitter: @wmariano

Ishan Thakore, Independent journalist/ Full Frontal with Samantha Bee 👇

Ishan Thakore is an independent journalist and associate producer for the Emmy Award-winning show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. He was previously a Sundance Institute Grantee for the BBC World Service and a National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fulbright Fellow. Thakore is a graduate of Duke University.

On Twitter: @ithakore

MaryJo Webster, Star Tribune 👇

On Twitter: @MaryJoWebster

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Covering the student debt crisis

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Last year the Education Department released its largest ever trove of data on borrowing, earnings and repayment rates for graduate students, parent loan borrowers, and others. How do you find narratives in a mass of data this big? We'll talk about some stories using this data that were published by The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and elsewhere. We'll discuss how local journalists or college newspaper reporters can find stories that pertain to their own campuses.

This session was sponsored by the Lumina Foundation. IRE retains control of content, including the topic and speaker selection, for all conference sessions.

Speakers

Andrea Fuller, The Wall Street Journal 👇

Andrea Fuller is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York City who specializes in data analysis. She uses spreadsheets, databases, and computer code to find stories. Ms. Fuller joined the Journal in April 2014. She previously was a data journalist at Gannett Digital, The Center for Public Integrity, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is a graduate of Stanford University.

On Twitter: @anfuller

Matt Krupnick, Independent journalist 👇

Matt Krupnick is a freelance journalist whose articles on subjects ranging from student loans and cash bail inequity to catfish farming and bison have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Newsweek, Hechinger Report and other publications. You can occasionally catch him in the background of popular television shows. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and rescue pets.

On Twitter: @mattkrupnick

Sessions starting at 12:30 p.m. ET

special IN-PERSON ONLY

Media lawyer Q&A

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A705 (Atrium level)

Description

Does your investigation contain complex legal questions? Unsure of how to proceed? Bring your lunch and your questions for a personal discussion with some prominent media law experts. We'll provide drinks and dessert.

Speakers

Maggie Mulvihill, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Matt Topic, Loevy & Loevy 👇

Matt Topic founded and leads the FOIA and media law practice at Loevy & Loevy. Matt and his team have litigated hundreds of state and federal FOIA cases, including the release of video exposing the Laquan McDonald murder and successful challenges to redactions to the Mueller Report.

On Twitter: @mvtopic

Sessions starting at 2 p.m. ET

commons IN-PERSON ONLY

Infusing a data-driven mindset throughout the newsroom

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

Advice from data editors/reporters on how to manage a data team to produce the best journalism possible, avoid being the dreaded service desk, and inspire your teammates. How do you spread the resources and knowledge across the newsroom to people who aren't on your team? How do you manage competing priorities? How do you advocate for more people and resources?

Speaker

Holly Hacker, Kaiser Health News 👇

On Twitter: @hollyhacker

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

SQL 3: Joining tables

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

Learn how to join tables, matching information from one file to another. We'll use SQLite and DB Browser, a free database manager.

This session is good for: People who are familiar with counting, summing or “GROUP BY” in SQL and want to add another tool to their SQL skill set.

Speaker

Joe Yerardi, Center for Public Integrity 👇

Joe Yerardi is a data reporter at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. In this role, he's investigated everything from the influence pharmaceutical companies wield over Medicaid programs' drug purchasing decisions to companies laying off employees after accepting PPP loans. Joe previously covered a wide range of beats as a data journalist in San Diego, California and San Antonio, Texas.

On Twitter: @JoeYerardi

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R: Linear and logistic regression and other statistical methods

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Linear regression helps you find relationships between two or more variables, but when an outcome has only two possibilities, you need a different tool. That, my friends, is where logistic regression comes in. This class will be taught in R.

This session is good for: People who took "Stats: An introduction" or are comfortable with summary statistics and spreadsheets. Experience with R is recommended.

Speaker

John Perry, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Mapping disparities in the news using Census data and QGIS

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

The stories found in geographic data don’t affect everyone the same, and Census data can help reveal these inequities. POLITICO editor Sean McMinn and ProPublica developer Ruth Talbot will talk through how they did these sorts of stories while working together at NPR, then will do a hands-on walkthrough to teach you how to:

• Find geographic data

• Combine Census demographic and shapefile data in QGIS

• Cross Census data with geocoded data

Speakers

Sean McMinn, POLITICO 👇

Sean McMinn is the editor of POLITICO's data and graphics team in Washington, D.C. He's especially interested in the reporting and investigative side of data journalism. He's previously worked as a data journalist at NPR and CQ Roll Call, and as a lecturer at Northwestern University and American University.

On Twitter: @shmcminn

Ruth Talbot, ProPublica 👇

Ruth Talbot is currently a News Apps Developer at ProPublica. Before ProPublica, Ruth was a News Apps Developer at NPR and a software engineer at Google. Outside of work, she eats a lot of Hi-Chews, writes bad fiction, and is trying (unsuccessfully) to grow her own mushrooms.

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Finding the story: Using DNS search for investigative journalism

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Atrium level)

Description

Every online interaction begins with a lookup in the Domain Name System (DNS), the backbone of the Internet. As a result, there are digital footprints left behind in the DNS. With the demise of Whois, investigative reporters are looking for new tools to uncover these footprints. Learn how to use DNSDB Scout, a tool to query DNSDB, a historical passive Domain Name System (DNS) database, to discover previously unknown online connections and gain new information to advance your ongoing and breaking news investigations.

Basic knowledge of the Domain Name System (DNS) is helpful, but not required.

Speakers

Ben April, DomainTools, LLC. 👇

Ben April is the Chief Architect at DomainTools, LLC. Prior to DomainTools, Ben was the CTO of Farsight Security, Inc. and the Americas manager of the Forward-looking Threat Research team at Trend Micro. Ben worked his way upstream from a dial-up ISP to a regional ISP to a global backbone, with roles in support, network operations, and provisioning. Ben is also a volunteer sysadmin and coder for some trusted-community security projects

On Twitter: @bapril

Kelly Molloy, DomainTools, LLC. 👇

Kelly Molloy has extensive experience is most aspects of network abuse prevention. She is currently the Director of Network Development at DomainTools.

On Twitter: @kellymolloy

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Beyond percentage change: The next formula every reporter should know

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

What do vaccine effectiveness, pay-to-play meetings with politicians, employment discrimination, and TSA security screening have in common? They're all topics which rely crucially on a risk ratio, a simple formula which compares how often something happens to two different groups. While the math isn't particularly hard, many people don't know how to work with these ratios or spot the stories which depend on them, which results in a number of common reporting errors. We'll work together in a Python notebook to do the calculations behind all of the above stories, and learn what the risk ratio means in each context.

Speaker

Jonathan Stray, UC Berkeley 👇

Jonathan Stray is a researcher at the Center for Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, where he works on the design of recommender systems for better personalized news and information. He teaches the dual masters degree in computer science and journalism at Columbia University, previously worked as an editor at the Associated Press, and built document mining software for investigative journalism.

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Let’s team up to assemble an important nationwide database that doesn’t exist

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 6:15 p.m. ET (255m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

"There is no national database tracking ..." It's a sentence appearing in too many stories about consequential issues. There's another way: build the data ourselves. We may have to cobble it together: some from states' open data repositories, some via open records requests and some by scraping those gnarly online tools government agencies call "transparency." We might even have to work from paper records. It's daunting work for one newsroom. It's less daunting if we gather colleagues to get it done faster and increase the reach and impact. That's the plan today.

Join a group of collaboration-minded journalists for this workshop where you will learn about, and participate in, building a nationwide database that does not exist. We'll discuss strategy and lessons learned with journalists who've worked on projects like this. We will work together to identify the data and start gathering it. By day's end, we will have the beginnings of a dataset -- and we will work together to craft a plan to finish it and share it with newsrooms across the country. We're treating this as a pilot to develop and test a model for these kinds of collaborative data projects.

This workshop is open to beginners and experts. Bring your laptop, collaborative spirit, ideas and skills. We'll need people with a knack for requesting electronic records, tidying ugly inconsistent data and scraping government web sites.

We will update with details about the topic before the conference begins.

Speaker

John Kelly, ABC News and ABC Owned Television Stations 👇

John Kelly is is an investigative reporter who leads data journalism for Disney's ABC Owned Television Stations and ABC News, after many years at The Associated Press, USA TODAY and Florida Today. He's led dozens of award-winning investigations, including a 2017 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the winner of the Goldsmith Prize in 2020 and winners of Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2020 and 2021.

On Twitter: @jkelly3rd

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Introduction to web development

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 4:45 p.m. ET (165m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

This session will introduce you to how the web works and the building blocks of web development: HTML, CSS and (a tiny bit of) JavaScript. By the end of the class, you will have built a simple web page and published it on the internet.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided for the training.

Workshop prerequisites: This session is good for beginners -- no experience necessary -- but you will need to sign up for a free GitHub account before attending.

Speakers

Dylan Freedman, Washington Post 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Anthony Pesce, Washington Post 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How to use data on the law enforcement beat to tell rich investigative stories for print, radio and national television

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Investigative data reporting on the law enforcement beat can generate stories that are more than boring reads loaded with numbers. We'll walk you through the steps, including how to file detailed public records requests, sift through documents and spreadsheets and use the data to help identify the strongest narrative threads for a deep-dive project.

Speakers

George Joseph, THE CITY 👇

George Joseph is a reporter for THE CITY, an online news site in New York. He covers the borough of Brooklyn with a special focus on courts, prosecutors, and police. Previously, he worked for New York City's NPR affiliate WNYC, where his investigations triggered the release of thousands of documents on alleged NYPD misconduct and a Department of Justice investigation into a small city police department in Westchester County.

On Twitter: @georgejoseph94

Emily Siegel, NBC News 👇

Emily Siegel is an investigative reporter with the NBC News Investigative Unit.

On Twitter: @Emilyrsiegel

Cheryl W. Thompson, NPR 👇

Cheryl W. Thompson is an investigative correspondent and senior editor for NPR, overseeing investigations for member stations. She was the reporting coach for the NPR podcast, "No Compromise," which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. She joined NPR in 2019 after writing about guns, police and corruption for 22 years for The Washington Post. In 2018, she was elected IRE’s first Black president and served three terms.

On Twitter: @cherylwt

Simone Weichselbaum, NBC News Investigations 👇

On Twitter: @simonejwei

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How does inequality and/or inequity show up in your beat?

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

This panel will focus on finding data to expose inequality or inequity in your beat. This will include: knowing where to look for data, tools and sources, measuring a hypothesis, and some data stories you can execute. We will discuss challenges with this data and what to do if the data doesn’t exist. This group of journalists will also walk you through data projects and stories they’ve produced and provide answers you can take back to your newsroom.

Speakers

Josh Hinkle, KXAN 👇

On Twitter: @hinklej

Annie Ma, Associated Press 👇

Annie Ma is a national reporter on the race & ethnicity team at the Associated Press, where she covers education. Her work focuses on inequality in our public education system and how race and class shape student outcomes, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Twitter: @anniema15

Ellis Simani, ProPublica 👇

Ellis Simani is a data reporter at ProPublica, where he uses data to tell investigative stories that hold the powerful accountable. His recent work has focused on systemic inequities in the tax code that enable the wealthy to avoid federal taxes. Before joining ProPublica, he worked on the Los Angeles Times’ data visualization desk.

On Twitter: @emsimani

Lam Thuy Vo, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism 👇

Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is a Soros Justice Fellow, a Type Investigations Ida B. Wells Fellows, and a data-journalist-in-residence at CUNY. Previously, she worked for BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR's Planet Money.

On Twitter: @lamthuyvo

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Don't have data? Collect it. How to incorporate citizen science into investigations

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

We take you behind the scenes of “Black Snow,” a one-year investigation by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica that assessed the health and environmental impacts of sugar cane burning in South Florida. Air monitoring deficiencies in the region prompted the team to deploy air sensors and measure pollution where data did not exist. Working with academics, we found a way to include the community in the collection of scientific evidence.

We’ll walk you through how we incorporated data visualization, engagement techniques and traditional reporting to collect evidence. We’ll highlight other projects that have embraced innovative crowdsourcing and scientific methods to elevate investigations.

You’ll learn how to:

Assess data gaps in your beat and identify ways to fill them

Use text bots (free!) to crowdsource information from many people at once

Engage community members to collect data with you

Use and analyze data from low-cost, easy-to-use air quality monitors

Design data-driven maps and visuals

Link to Black Snow: https://projects.propublica.org/black-snow/

Speakers

Maya Miller, ProPublica 👇

Maya Miller is an engagement reporter at ProPublica working on community-sourced investigations.

On Twitter: @mayatmiller

Ash Ngu, ProPublica 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times 👇

Lulu Ramadan is an investigative reporter with The Seattle Times and a distinguished fellow with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network. Prior to joining The Times, Ramadan covered government accountability, environmental justice and voting rights at The Palm Beach Post, her hometown paper in South Florida.

On Twitter: @luluramadan

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Best practices for a successful collaboration

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

There are fewer journalists and fewer outlets, but the problems aren't getting smaller. Learn how to build a successful collaboration that's more than just a single story.

Speakers

Brant Houston, University of Illinois 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Maggie Mulvihill, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Deb Nelson, University of Maryland 👇

Deb Nelson is professor of investigative journalism at the University of Maryland, home of the Howard Center, which produces student-powered, data-driven projects in collaboration with other schools and news outlets. She’s a freelance reporter for Reuters, co-authoring projects that earned top honors from the National Academies of Sciences, AAAS, SPJ and WHCA. She previously worked at The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times and Seattle Times, where she shared in a Pulitzer Prize.

Cheryl Phillips, Stanford University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sessions starting at 3:45 p.m. ET

demo IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Who is behind this website?

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Reporting online today, journalists must battle with astroturf campaigns, fake news sites and sketchy shell companies to find out who is behind the story. Usually it leads to a frustratingly common question: Who is behind this website?

Using a range of tools (free and otherwise), we will walk you through how to investigate the provenance and ownership of websites: how can you identify the scope and scale of the network it belongs to — if any? Who’s behind the site, now and in the past? Who are the main actors promoting this website? Where else does this site crop up?

While it is not always possible to fully unmask the owner of a site, using a thorough checklist of tools and techniques that we have used in real-world investigations, we can help you make sure to reveal as much as possible about a website, and potentially uncover important clues.

Speakers

Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University 👇

Senior Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism focusing on computational techniques to research the digital media landscape, including partisan local news as well as the intersection of platforms, policy and media.

On Twitter: @acookiecrumbles

Jon Keegan, The Markup 👇

Investigative data journalist at The Markup. Adjunct at Columbia University School of Journalism. Previously: The Tow Center and The Wall Street Journal.

On Twitter: @jonkeegan

demo IN-PERSON ONLY

Using Eviction Lab's data and finding your own

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Eviction Lab has created the only national database on evictions and an Eviction Tracking System for specific cities and states during the pandemic. The speakers will explain what data is available, what can reporters do with it and how to create your own databases for areas that are still not covered.

Speakers

Juan Pablo Garnham, Eviction Lab 👇

On Twitter: @jpgarnham

Emily Lemmerman, Eviction Lab at Princeton University 👇

Emily Lemmerman is a research specialist at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, an interdisciplinary research team that built and maintains the nation’s first national eviction dataset. Her work has focused on understanding eviction filing patterns during the pandemic, the demographics of eviction, and influence of federal public housing policy on eviction filings. She received her B.A. in sociology with a focus in data science from Stanford University.

On Twitter: @e_lemmerman

demo IN-PERSON ONLY

The Accountability Project

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

The Accountability Project from The Investigative Reporting Workshop lets you search more than half a billion records from federal, state and local government data. We'll give you a tour of the site, show you the latest features and send you home with data you can turn into stories.

Speaker

Jacob Fenton, Investigative Reporting Workshop 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Working with climate data

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

An introduction to working with gridded files, such as netCDFs, that are commonly used to store data in climate science. This workshop will go through how to load, view, process and visualise climate data, predominantly working in R.

Participants are expected to have prior knowledge of R, but do not need to be experts. A basic understanding of raster files for mapping could come in handy, but is not essential.

Speakers

Becky Dale, BBC 👇

On Twitter: @becky_dale

Nassos Stylianou, BBC News 👇

On Twitter: @nassos_

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

SQL: Update queries, sub-queries and more advanced techniques

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

If you feel comfortable with the Structured Query Language basics that IRE teaches in its bootcamps — SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY — but are ready to see what else SQL can do, this session is for you. We will cover more advanced ways of manipulating and questioning data, such as UPDATE queries, joins, writing sub-queries and other neat tricks. We will use SQLite in the class.

This session will be most helpful if: You are comfortable with counting and summing in SQL.

Speaker

Liz Lucas, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Mapping disparities in the news using Census data and QGIS (repeat)

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

• Find geographic data

• Combine Census demographic and shapefile data in QGIS

• Cross Census data with geocoded data

Speakers

Sean McMinn, POLITICO 👇

On Twitter: @shmcminn

Ruth Talbot, ProPublica 👇

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Mapping and geographic data analysis with the simple features package in R

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

The sf (Simple Features) package in R (https://r-spatial.github.io/sf/) represents vector geodata as data frames with the geometry held in a single list-column. As such, it allows you to process geodata in pipelines that consistent with the syntax of dplyr and other tidyverse packages. This session will provide an introduction to the Simple Features in R package, show how to draw maps from sf objects with ggplot2, and how to run spatial queries on geodata much as you would in PostGIS.

Speaker

Peter Aldhous, BuzzFeed News 👇

Peter Aldhous is a science reporter at BuzzFeed News. He also teaches in the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and for the Berkeley Advanced Media Institute.

On Twitter: @paldhous

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Finding the story: Using DNS search for investigative journalism (repeat)

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A705 (Atrium level)

Description

Basic knowledge of the Domain Name System (DNS) is helpful, but not required.

Speakers

Ben April, DomainTools, LLC. 👇

On Twitter: @bapril

Kelly Molloy, DomainTools, LLC. 👇

Kelly Molloy has extensive experience is most aspects of network abuse prevention. She is currently the Director of Network Development at DomainTools.

On Twitter: @kellymolloy

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Building a data pipeline with GitHub Actions

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Lobby level)

Description

Learn how to use Github Actions to create a data pipeline, from automating data collection to basic analysis and visualization. This session will teach you how to:

- Scrape a simple data file

- Log the file to a GitHub repository

- Automate this process using a GitHub Actions workflow

- Automate basic analysis and visualization of the data

Prerequisites: Sign up for a free GitHub account prior to the session.

Speakers

Nick McMillan, NPR 👇

Nick McMillan is an investigative fellow at NPR. He utilizes data driven techniques, video and motion graphics to tell stories. Previously, McMillan worked at Newsy on investigative documentaries where he contributed to stories uncovering white supremacists in the U.S. military and the aftermath of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rican school children. McMillan has a bachelor's in Statistics from Rice University and a master's in Journalism from the University of Maryland.

On Twitter: @ndm_visuals

Aadit Tambe, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism 👇

On Twitter: @aadittambe

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Election 2022: Following state election money

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Congressional elections will be in the spotlight in 2022, but don't overlook state elections. Legislative bodies, governors and other state-level public officials have plenty of impact on our audiences, and big bucks are often spent on the most competitive of these contests. Join this panel to get story ideas and tips for covering the money at the state level in 2022.

Speakers

Sandra Fish, Colorado Sun 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Nic Garcia, Des Moines Register 👇

Nic Garcia is the politics editor for the Des Moines Register. Before landing in Iowa, he covered politics at all levels in Colorado and Texas.

On Twitter: @nicgarcia

Yue Stella Yu, Bridge Michigan 👇

Yue Stella Yu covers state politics for Bridge Michigan with a focus on money and power. She previously covered politics in Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @bystellayu

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Case studies in machine learning

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 3:45 – 4:45 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Machine learning doesn’t always have to be flashy; it’s enough for it to be useful. In this panel, reporters will talk you through how they used machine learning in investigations this year. You’ll see how machine learning was helpful as part of data collection and data analysis for investigations into TikTok, local land bank corruption, document leaks, and more. Panelists will show you (1) how to identify a good ML use case, (2) how to set up easy, repeatable processes to get good training data, (3) how to extend pre-trained models to fit your custom needs, and (4) what are the realities, not fantasies, of AI in the newsroom.

Speakers

Rob Barry, The Wall Street Journal 👇

Rob Barry is an investigative reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal. He helps lead the newspaper’s data team and has reported on topics including nation-state hacking, terror-finance, killings by police, Medicare costs, insider trading, foreign and domestic elections, stockbrokers and aviation safety.

On Twitter: @rob_barry

Meredith Broussard, New York University 👇

Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.” Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.

On Twitter: @merbroussard

Jeremy Merrill, The Washington Post 👇

Jeremy Merrill is a data journalist covering the tech industry at The Washington Post. He lives in Atlanta. He's obsessed with online ads and using AI for newsgathering.

On Twitter: @jeremybmerrill

Lucia Walinchus, Eye on Ohio, the Ohio Center for Journalism 👇

On Twitter: @SoSaysLucia

John West, The Wall Street Journal 👇

John West is the lead technologist with The Wall Street Journal’s R&D team, where he reports the news with code, focusing on novel methods of data collection and analysis. Previously, he worked as a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and as a writer and engineer at Quartz. His first book — a long essay about addiction, liturgy, and art — is forthcoming in late 2022.

On Twitter: @johnwest

Sessions starting at 5 p.m. ET

special IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Lightning Talks

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 5 – 6:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Sometimes you don't need 45 minutes to explain a useful technique or interesting resource. Join your colleagues for a session of short (5-minute) talks about doing data journalism, web development or other related topics.

Lightning Talks are sponsored by Knight Foundation. IRE retains control of content, including the topic and speaker selection, for all conference sessions.

Speaker

K. Sophie Will, The Spectrum/USA Today/Report for America 👇

On Twitter: @ksophiewill

Sessions starting at 6:15 p.m. ET

special IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Philip Meyer Award presentation

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 6:15 – 6:30 p.m. ET (15m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

The presentation of the 2021 Philip Meyer Journalism Awards will take place on Friday evening, directly following Lightning Talks.

The awards recognize the best uses of social research methods in journalism and are named in honor of Philip Meyer, author of “Precision Journalism” and retired Knight Chair in Journalism and UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Join fellow NICAR attendees and award winners at a reception immediately following the awards presentation beginning at 6:30 p.m. Friday.

Speakers

Sarah Cohen, Arizona State University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Diana Fuentes, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Brant Houston, University of Illinois 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sessions starting at 6:30 p.m. ET

special IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Philip Meyer reception

🕙 Friday (3/4) • 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

Description

Join fellow NICAR attendees and award winners at a reception with light appetizers and a cash bar immediately following the awards presentation beginning at 6:30 p.m. Friday.

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

Saturday, 3/5

Sessions starting at 8 a.m. ET

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Digging into data (cont'd)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 8 – 11 a.m. ET (1620m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your newsroom, including how to find and request data, identify and clean dirty data, find story ideas and bulletproof your work.

We’ll also provide you with our detailed boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference.

Workshop prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this workshop and beginners are welcome. This workshop is good for those wanting to get started analyzing data for stories.

Pre-registration is required and seating is very limited to allow for social distancing. You must bring your own laptop (no tablets) to this training and have a Google account.

Speakers

Patti DiVincenzo, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Liz Lucas, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Cody Winchester, IRE & NICAR 👇

Cody Winchester is the senior training director at IRE & NICAR.

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 1: Intro to R and RStudio (Saturday repeat)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Jump into data analysis with R, the powerful open-source programming language. In this class we’ll cover R fundamentals and learn our way around the RStudio interface for using R.

This session is good for: People with a basic understanding of code who are ready to go beyond Excel.

Speaker

Rob Wells, University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism 👇

Rob Wells, Ph.D., is a Visiting Associate Professor at Maryland and taught data and investigative journalism at the University of Arkansas from 2016-2021. He is the author of The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019). He is the former bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires in Washington, D.C.,

On Twitter: @rswells1961

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Python: The fundamentals

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

An introduction to the Python programming language for absolute beginners. This session will cover the fundamentals and basic syntax to prepare you for more advanced classes.

This session is good for: People who are comfortable working with data in spreadsheets or database managers and want to make the leap to programming.

Speaker

Shirsho Dasgupta, Miami Herald/McClatchy DC Bureau 👇

Shirsho Dasgupta is a data/investigative reporter with the Washington Bureau of the Miami Herald/McClatchy newspapers. He often uses Python, SQL and Excel in his work. He has won multiple awards for stories ranging from financial crime to Florida's prison system. He holds Master's degrees in both English and Journalism.

On Twitter: @ShirshoD

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel: Cleaning dirty data

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

Dirty data lurk everywhere. We'll walk through some integrity checks to help diagnose problems with your data and learn how to deal with some of the most common problems, including standardizing misspelled names.

This session is good for: People with some experience working with data in columns and rows, in spreadsheets or database managers.

Speaker

Liz Lucas, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Web scraping with Python

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

If you need data that's trapped on a website, writing some code to scrape the page could be your solution. This entry-level class will show you how to use the Python programming language to harvest information from websites into a spreadsheet. We'll introduce you to the command line and show you how to write enough code to fetch and parse web content.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided.

Workshop prerequisites: This class is programming for beginners. Some basic familiarity with Python and HTML is helpful but not required.

Speakers

Andrea Suozzo, ProPublica 👇

Andrea Suozzo is a news apps developer at ProPublica, where she works on Nonprofit Explorer, builds databases and creates graphics. In her free time, she runs, reads, cooks and plays the fiddle.

On Twitter: @asuozzo

Derek Willis, University of Maryland 👇

Derek Willis is a lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He runs OpenElections, a volunteer effort to collect and publish official precinct election results.

On Twitter: @derekwillis

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Upping your Excel game

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: A702 (Atrium level)

Description

If you've found yourself struggling in a spreadsheet, thinking that whatever you were trying to achieve seemed harder than it should've been, then this is the class for you. We’ll learn about various tools and functions in Excel that come in handy when you need to re-structure or otherwise get your data ready for analysis. We'll cover string functions, logical functions, date functions, reshaping data, merging data using lookup functions and perhaps a few other nifty tricks if time allows. We’ll do some “drills” introducing you to these concepts, then put your new skills to work in a sort of “scrimmage,” fixing up some real-life data. You’ll also walk out with practice data and a 30-page tipsheet that covers, in detail, everything from the class, plus more that we won’t have time for.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided for the training.

Workshop prerequisites: You should have prior experience using Excel or Google Sheets, and be comfortable with introductory-level spreadsheet skills, such as sorting, filtering, SUM and AVERAGE functions, calculations such as percentage change or percent of total, and how to use pivot tables.

Speaker

MaryJo Webster, Star Tribune 👇

On Twitter: @MaryJoWebster

hands-on: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

First Visual Story

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET (480m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

Armand Emamdjomeh, Vanessa Martinez and Ben Welsh teach you how America’s top news organizations escape rigid content-management systems to publish custom graphics on deadline.

Take this six-hour class to get hands-on experience in every stage of the development process, writing JavaScript, HTML and CSS within a Node.js framework. You’ll start with data from a real-life Los Angeles Times analysis. You won’t stop until you’ve crafted a custom presentation and deployed a working application on the World Wide Web.

Preregistration is required and seating is limited. Laptops will be provided.

Workshop prerequisites: If you have a good attitude and know how to take a few code crashes in stride, you are qualified for this class. If you’re a little scared, that’s a good thing. You’re ready for this.

Speakers

Armand Emamdjomeh, The Washington Post 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Vanessa Martinez, Los Angeles Times 👇

Vanessa Martínez is a data and graphics journalist at the Los Angeles Times.

On Twitter: @VanessaMartinez

Ben Welsh, Los Angeles Times/Big Local News at Stanford University 👇

On Twitter: @palewire

master class: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Master Class: How to optimize your records requests and appeals (morning class)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Lobby level)

📝 Description coming soon!

Speaker

Matt Topic, Loevy & Loevy 👇

On Twitter: @mvtopic

master class: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Managing high-performing tech and data teams

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: A705 (Atrium level)

Description

There's plenty of literature on managing technical teams. But working close to newsrooms breaks many standard assumptions about how teams should work. This workshop will be a hands-on, tactical session for producing a framework for managing technical teams that work either within or in the shadow of a newsroom. Topics include: Managing the inverted deadline; modified career paths; load balancing your single points of brilliance; recruiting and hiring; working with HR and compensation to meet your team's needs; managing high-ownership individuals through burnout.

Speakers

Jeremy Bowers, The Washington Post 👇

Jeremy Bowers is the director of newsroom engineering and publishing tools at The Washington Post, with a particular focus on elections and newsroom tooling. Previously, he was a senior editor for news applications at The New York Times and a news apps developer on the NPR Visuals team.

On Twitter: @jeremybowers

Tiff Fehr, The New York Times 👇

Tiff Fehr is a staff engineer and project lead with the Interactive News team, a group of technologists embedded in the newsroom of The New York Times. She focuses on custom software development for the newsroom, as well as data-journalism projects like The Times's Covid-19 real-time data-acquisition pipeline and open-source data set.

On Twitter: @tiffehr

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Working with journalism students, data and media partners to tell stories for social good

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Collaborating with students can help strengthen data-driven investigative stories, providing a place and time to advance deep-dive stories while giving students much-needed real-life experience. We speak with investigative reporters and educators about the benefits and challenges of working with students and professional partners to create impactful stories for social good. Good for educators, students and journalists hoping to increase their bandwidth.

Speakers

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism/Grand Valley State University 👇

On Twitter: @JeffKLO

Jenifer McKim, Boston University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sean Mussenden, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism/Univ. of Maryland 👇

On Twitter: @smussenden

Brooke Williams, Boston University 👇

Brooke Williams is an investigative reporter, professor of the practice of computational journalism, and civic tech fellow at Boston University. Her data-driven investigative reporting has contributed to a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, a George Polk Award and a Gerald Loeb Award, among others. She recently co-launched the Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab at BU.

On Twitter: @reporterbrooke

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Making numbers count

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

With so much data to deal with these days, we'll give you some guidelines for getting common calculations right, tips for writing/talking about numbers and we'll discuss your questions.

Speakers

Holly Hacker, Kaiser Health News 👇

On Twitter: @hollyhacker

Jennifer LaFleur, Center for Public integrity 👇

Jennifer LaFleur is an editor at The Center for Public Integrity.

On Twitter: @j_la28

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How and why to make your data analysis reproducible

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

You understand how you processed your data. Does your editor? Your reader? You, in six months? Without a replicable approach to extracting, transforming and loading data, we are often frustrated in our efforts to share or update our work. Join us for a panel discussion of reproducible data workflows. We’ll talk about why we use standardized processes for collecting, cleaning and analyzing data, and share practices that work for us. We’ll also discuss strategies for smart human intervention (i.e. reporting, logging and documentation) in automated workflows.

Speakers

Tyler Dukes, The News & Observer 👇

Tyler Dukes is an investigative reporter at The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C. In 2017, he completed a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Prior to joining the N&O, he worked as an investigative reporter on the state politics team at WRAL News. He is also the former managing editor of the Duke University Reporters' Lab, where he researched tools and techniques for reducing the costs of investigative journalism.

On Twitter: @mtdukes

Irena Hwang, ProPublica 👇

On Twitter: @irenatfh

Aaron Kessler, Associated Press 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Elections 2022: Uncovering foreign influence operations in the U.S.

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 9 – 10:15 a.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

This panel will demonstrate how to use tools to investigate and track foreign influence operations. Journalists will learn how to piece together opaque spending networks and uncover crucial details about operations through tax returns, Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) files, digital ad data, corporate records, lobbying disclosures and other sources.

Speakers

Anna Massoglia, OpenSecrets 👇

Anna Massoglia is OpenSecrets' Editorial and Investigations Manager. Her research also includes "dark money," political ads and foreign influence. She holds degrees in political science and psychology from North Carolina State University and a J.D. from the University of the District of Columbia School of Law. Anna previously worked as a research analyst, writer and editor at Bloomberg BNA.

On Twitter: @annalecta

Aaron Schaffer, The Washington Post 👇

Aaron Schaffer is a researcher for Technology 202 and Cybersecurity 202 policy newsletters at The Washington Post. He previously wrote a newsletter on Middle East lobbying in Washington for Al-Monitor. He attended the University of Rochester as an undergraduate and American University, where he received a master's degree in journalism.

On Twitter: @aaronjschaffer

Sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. ET

IN-PERSON ONLY

Cybersecurity for journalists

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704

Description

With ransomware attacks and other cybersecurity issues on the rise, there are a host of tools throughout your data and reporting process that should be in mind. This session will help journalists boost their "cyber hygiene."

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 2: Data analysis and plotting (Saturday repeat)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: People who have worked with data operations in SQL or Excel and would like to do the same in R.

Speaker

Rob Wells, University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism 👇

On Twitter: @rswells1961

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Python: Intro to data analysis using Pandas

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

Imagine rolling Excel and SQL into one tool that also allows you to track your code and share it: That's pandas in a nutshell. There's a lot more you can do with it, of course, but this will be a good start. We'll learn how to slice and dice our data and extract basic stats. Specifically, we'll cover loading the data, filtering, sorting and grouping data.

This class is good for: People who are comfortable with Excel and are familiar with the basics of SQL and Python. We recommend that you attend a Python 101 session or have equivalent experience before coming to this class.

Speaker

Jonathan Soma, Columbia University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel: Using string functions to manipulate data

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

Maybe you converted a PDF or imported a table into Excel -- or maybe an agency gave you a poorly formatted file. You can use string functions to reformat your data and get your spreadsheets working for you.

This session is good for: Anyone comfortable with using formulas in Excel.

Speaker

Jamie Grey, Gray Television 👇

Jamie Grey is managing editor of investigations for Gray Television's national investigative team. She lives in Kansas City and works in New Orleans. She has a passion for data reporting and enjoys using data skills to analyze NFL records for Fantasy Football.

On Twitter: @TVNewsJamie

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Tracking the diversity of your sources

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Hear from journalists across the nation who are leading the way on making sure our sources better reflect the communities we live in and the issues we cover -- from creating innovative source databases to comprehensive ways of tracking diversity of sources newsroom-wide.

Speakers

Lauren Chapman, Indiana Public Broadcasting 👇

Lauren Chapman is the digital editor for Indiana Public Broadcasting. She's spent the last six years in public media, but worked in newspapers, commercial TV and started her career at an Indianapolis basketball magazine.

On Twitter: @laurenechapman_

Yoohyun Jung, San Francisco Chronicle 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Liz Worthington, American Press Institute 👇

Liz Worthington is director of Metrics for News and Source Matters at the American Press Institute. MFN is a content strategy analytics tool that helps publishers better understand their audiences through data. Source Matters is a source diversity tracking tool that helps publishers understand how their coverage reflects the voices of their communities. Liz has been at API for about 8 years, which she joined after nearly 10 years as a reporter and editor.

On Twitter: @lizmworthington

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Best practices to get and use data on the LGBTQ community

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Interested in using more data in your reporting? Learn how to get started, how to sharpen your requesting and analysis skills, and the pros and cons of digging into what data is out there on the LGBTQ community.

Speakers

Kae Petrin, Chalkbeat 👇

On Twitter: @kaepetrin

Adam Rhodes, Chicago Reader 👇

Adam M. Rhodes is a queer, nonbinary, first-generation Cuban American journalist. Rhodes is currently a social justice reporter at the Chicago Reader, where their work centers primarily on queer people and people of color. Their recent work has examined COVID-19 booster rates in state prisons, racism in Chicago’s principal queer neighborhood, and HIV criminalization in Illinois.

On Twitter: @byadamrhodes

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Artisanal data collection methods: Hand crafting surveys for investigative journalism

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 10:45 a.m. – 12 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

It’s not the end of your project when data doesn’t exist — quite the contrary! Writing your own surveys can lead to some wonderful investigative projects. Surveys can be scaled up or down depending on the breadth of your project and capabilities of your newsroom. We will discuss precision journalism methods to help fill in those information gaps and identify key sources for your work. Finally, it’s important to disclose your methodology to your readers and viewers. We’ll show you how.

Speakers

Emily Featherston, InvestigateTV 👇

Emily is an Investigative Producer with InvestigateTV, Gray Television's national investigative team. She has a background in television, print and digital media focusing on government accountability, elections, healthcare and business stories. She graduated with her BA and MBA from Samford University.

On Twitter: @emvestigates

Nicole Hayden, The Oregonian 👇

Nicole Hayden is the homelessness reporter for The Oregonian in Portland where she specializes in survey-based research. She previously was the homelessness reporter for The Desert Sun/USA Today in California and the lead investigative reporter for The Times Herald/USA Today in Michigan.

On Twitter: @Nicole_A_Hayden

Kate Martin, Carolina Public Press 👇

Kate Martin is the lead investigative reporter for Carolina Public Press. Her work over nearly two decades of journalism has sparked reforms, resignations, firings, criminal indictments and convictions. At least five state laws or legal precedents have changed because of her work. Her recent investigation into where SANE nurses work inspired a N.C. Congresswoman to author a bill that will pay $30 million per year to train SANE nurses nationwide and other improvements.

On Twitter: @KateReports

Sessions starting at 11 a.m. ET

special IN-PERSON ONLY

IRE Board Meeting

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: A708 (Atrium level)

Description

The IRE Board of Directors will meet at the NICAR22 conference. All current IRE members are invited to attend in-person or virtually.

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

Sessions starting at 2 p.m. ET

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Using GitHub in your newsroom

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L406 (Lobby level)

Description

We'll cover Github's basics features — repositories, commits, branches, pull requests and issues — using a recent data-driven story as a case study. The goal is for you to leave the class and be able to use GitHub on your own for your next story.

This session is good for: Journalists who want to collaborate on data analyses, back up their work and share their methodology with (nerdy) readers.

You will need to bring your own laptop. This session is for new GitHub users — no coding experience is required for this workshop — but you will need to create an account at GitHub.com if you don't have one already and install GitHub Desktop. (instructions are here: https://help.github.com/desktop/guides/getting-started-with-github-desktop/installing-github-desktop/)

Speaker

Justin Myers, The Associated Press 👇

On Twitter: @myersjustinc

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 3: Gathering and cleaning data (Saturday repeat)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: People who have used R and have a basic understanding of how to retrieve data from APIs.

Speaker

Rob Wells, University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism 👇

On Twitter: @rswells1961

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

QGIS 1: Importing and displaying geographic data

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A702 (Atrium level)

Description

Learn to how to make your own maps using free, open-source software called QGIS. This class will teach you how to get started importing and displaying geographic data. Not all datasets need to be mapped, but some do! We'll go over how to find publicly available data, prepare it for mapping, and join together different datasets.

This session is good for: Beginners looking to learn the basics of visualizing geographic data.

Speakers

Harriet Agerholm, BBC 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Becky Dale, BBC 👇

On Twitter: @becky_dale

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Python: Intro to web scraping

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

This session will show you how to use the Python programming language to scrape data from websites.

This session is good for: People who already feel comfortable writing simple Python scripts and understand basic syntax (data types, if/else statements, for loops, etc.). Experience with HTML is a plus but not necessary.

Speaker

Allan James Vestal, POLITICO 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Introduction to Neo4j: Graph databases for data journalism

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

Learn how to model, store, query and visualize data as a graph in this hands-on introduction to the Neo4j graph database. Graphs allow us to work with data as connected entities and can be a powerful tool for data-driven investigations involving complex or connected data. In this session we will use data related to U.S. Senate financial transactions to demonstrate how to import CSV/JSON data, write queries using the Cypher query language, and use interactive graph data visualization to find insights.

This session is good for: Beginners to graph databases.

Speaker

Will Lyon, Neo4j 👇

William Lyon is a software developer at Neo4j, the open-source graph database where he also leads the Neo4j Data Journalism Accelerator Program. William holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Montana and is the author of the book "Full Stack GraphQL." You can find him online at lyonwj.com

On Twitter: @lyonwj

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel: Basic stats

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

You don't need a special statistics program to run simple statistical analysis. In this session, you'll learn how to compute some basic statistics in Excel and figure out what they mean.

This session is good for: People who already are comfortable with using functions in Excel.

Speaker

Norm Lewis, University of Florida 👇

On Twitter: @bikeprof

master class: pre-registration required IN-PERSON ONLY

Master Class: How to optimize your records requests and appeals (afternoon class)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 5 p.m. ET (180m)

🚪 Room: L405 (Lobby level)

Description

Public records laws are complex and have many traps for the unwary that the government will exploit. This master class will walk through these and also invite participants to bring in their FOIA denials and issues for group discussion.

Speaker

Matt Topic, Loevy & Loevy 👇

On Twitter: @mvtopic

panel IN-PERSON ONLY

Using nontraditional data to expand data journalism education beyond U.S.-centric narratives

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Writing lesson plans around nontraditional data can expand data journalism education in college and j-school beyond just stories important to a U.S. audience or telling just an 'American' story, and beyond just education based on hard data skills. By using data on the global refugee crisis, US troop presence around the world, vaccination policies across countries, book translation data, among other datasets, we can shift students' focus to global issues; and by using nontraditional data, like academic data, data compiled from documents, or data as historical dates or events, we can emphasize that journalists should not be content with just the clean(ish) data government organizations allow us to use. We should be teaching how to produce new, public data that tries to address the problems inherent in state-centric narratives.

Speakers

Nausheen Husain, Syracuse University 👇

Nausheen (no'sheen) is a writer, data reporter and professor currently in upstate New York. She teaches data and investigative journalism at Syracuse University; before this, she was a data reporter and developer at the Chicago Tribune. She attended UC Berkeley and NYU.

On Twitter: @nausheenhusain

Lisa Waananen Jones, Washington State University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Lam Thuy Vo, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism 👇

On Twitter: @lamthuyvo

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Navigating the U.S. Freedom of Information Act

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Hear practical advice and strategies for crafting FOIA requests, tracking them and holding officials’ feet to the fire. Includes strategies for dealing with excuses and obstacles from public officials who stand in your way of getting key documents and data.

Speakers

Marisa Kwiatkowski, USA TODAY 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Beryl Lipton, Electronic Frontier Foundation 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Gunita Singh, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press 👇

Gunita is an attorney at RCFP where she works on litigation, policy, and amicus work around state and federal FOI laws while helping reporters with records requests. She co-authored a chapter in COVID-19: The Legal Challenges (Carolina Academic Press, 2021) titled "Access to Public Records and the Role of the News Media in Providing Information About COVID-19.” She serves on the board at LION Publishers and was previously an attorney at Property of the People.

On Twitter: @gunita_singh

Mark Walker, The New York Times 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Make your data story ironclad

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

We walk through all the steps you need to take to make sure the data you've been working on for months cannot be dismissed by naysayers. And we sound warning bells for some of the most dangerous mistakes and assumptions that come up in using data in the newsroom.

Speakers

Rebecca Lindstrom, WXIA-TV 👇

Investigative Reporter on 11Alive's team, The Reveal, in Atlanta. I'm willing to cover where ever corruption leads, but generally focus on social and child welfare issues.

On Twitter: @LindstromNews

Christian McDonald, University of Texas at Austin 👇

Christian McDonald is Innovation Director and an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism and Media, with a focus on data journalism and programming. His most recent professional position was data and online projects editor at the Austin American-Statesman. He also worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and at Cox publications in suburban Phoenix and Longview, Texas.

On Twitter: @crit

Shawn Mcintosh, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Finding health data for stories

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 2 – 3:15 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Whether you're doing a daily story or something longer-term, this panel will give an overview of what's out there, along with recently published stories that use health data sets, from local to national to international. (Examples: pharmacy data, hospital and nursing home inspections, and, yes, probably some COVID data.) Also: What questions to ask the data so you can determine how helpful and trustworthy it is.

Speakers

Holly Hacker, Kaiser Health News 👇

On Twitter: @hollyhacker

Sophie Novack, independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Matthew Ritchey, Center for Disease Control and Prevention 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Sessions starting at 3:45 p.m. ET

commons IN-PERSON ONLY

Code buddies: Get help on your project

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

For those attending in person: Bring your laptop and we'll work together to move your project forward.

For those attending online: Join our Zoom room and we’ll connect you with an available peer expert.

If you let us know a little about your project in advance, we'll reach out to some peer experts who have just the right experience to help you out.

* The Lonely Coder's Club is a Slack community of newsroom data nerds and programmers who run solo or on small teams.

Speakers

Allie Kanik, Houston Chronicle 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Ryan Pitts, OpenNews 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

demo IN-PERSON ONLY

Using DataLab to analyze federal education data

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

The National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) disseminates much of its data publicly through an easy-to-use online data hub called DataLab (https://nces.ed.gov/datalab/). Newsrooms are invited to interact with these data on topics such as financial aid and school safety in the newly redesigned DataLab. The proposed demonstration session will review how journalists currently use DataLab and demonstrate how users can access over 100 sample survey datasets. Attendees will then be prepared to access data collected during the Covid 19 pandemic as soon as it is released!

This session is good for: Anyone interested in interacting with NCES data to develop data tables, data visualizations, and regression analysis within a web interface. "

Speaker

Tracy Hunt-White, U.S. Department of Education 👇

Tracy Hunt-White has been an education statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) since 2003. She is the project officer for the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which examines how students and their parents pay for college. She is also the project officer for the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study. She earned her Ph.D. in Education Administration from The Catholic University of America.

demo IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Using data in pursuit of solutions journalism

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Solutions journalism is rigorous, evidence-based reporting on responses to social problems. And data make for a great partner in solutions reporting, because when the impact of a response can be measured in numbers, it’s easy to discover the places that stand out and are worth a deeper look.

This session will explore the use of "positive deviants" – outliers in data that might point to a place or a program that has found a better way: the school district that cut the achievement gap by implementing specific policies; the state that applied new protocols in hospitals that significantly reduced the number of women who die in childbirth; the neighborhoods that have reversed environmental injustices and greatly improved urban tree canopy. Stories like these attract readers and viewers, who are increasingly turned off by news coverage focused exclusively on failure.

Adding a solutions lens to traditional investigative reporting leads to better accountability journalism, and data can play a key role in that. This session will present an overview of solutions journalism and positive deviance, followed by tips from a reporter explaining how they used data in pursuit of a timely and critical solutions story: identifying school districts around the country that found ways to safely reopen schools during the pandemic.

Speakers

Matthew Kauffman, Solutions Journalism Network 👇

Matthew Kauffman leads a data-reporting project for the Solutions Journalism Network, helping newsrooms pursue solutions reporting by identifying “positive deviants” – outliers in data that might point to places or programs successfully responding to social problems. Prior to joining SJN, he was an investigative and data journalist with the Hartford Courant, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series on suicide in the military.

On Twitter: @matthewkauffman

Betsy Ladyzhets, Documenting COVID-19/MuckRock; COVID-19 Data Dispatch 👇

Betsy Ladyzhets is a science, health, and data journalist focused on COVID-19. She runs the COVID-19 Data Dispatch, a publication that provides news, resources, and original reporting on pandemic data. She's also a journalism fellow at Documenting COVID-19, a public records and investigative project supported by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock. Her work has appeared in Science News, FiveThirtyEight, the COVID Tracking Project, and other outlets.

On Twitter: @betsyladyzhets

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

SQL: Cleaning dirty data

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A701 (Atrium level)

Description

Spend enough time around databases and inevitably you’ll come across one that has an obnoxious number of variations on city names: New York City. New York. NYC. NY. And yes, even NY City. If you’re not sure how to handle that, this session is for you. We’ll cover how to deal with multiple spellings and misspellings, strange date formats and category codes, as well as a few other tricks and tips for using SQL to clean data.

This session will be most useful if: You are familiar with basic SQL statements.

Speaker

David Herzog, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

QGIS 2: Building your first map

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A702 (Atrium level)

Description

Build on your existing knowledge of QGIS and learn how to filter and analyze geographic datasets, before familiarising yourself with labelling and exporting publication-ready maps using the print composer.

This session is good for: Those who attended the QGIS I workshop or already know the basics of visualizing geographic data in QGIS.

Speakers

Will Dahlgreen, BBC 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Rob England, BBC News 👇

Rob is a data journalist with the BBC's Data and Analysis team. The team specialise in both domestic and international data driven investigations on a range of topics, finding the stories behind the numbers and using this to discover the people whose lives are most affected. Rob lives in Birmingham in the UK, and this is his first time in Atlanta and at NICAR.

On Twitter: @England_Rob_

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Finding the story: Nonprofit data

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L401 (Lobby level)

Description

The IRS releases a lot of fascinating data on nonprofits, such as how much money they take in, how much money they spend on fundraising, and what they pay their executives. This data isn't easy to wrap your head around and it can be pretty unwieldy. (We're talking giant Excel files here!) In this hands-on session, we'll work through how to use some of this data to find juicy stories.

This session will use R but you don't need to be conversant with R to follow along.

Speaker

Andrea Fuller, The Wall Street Journal 👇

On Twitter: @anfuller

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 4: Advanced Pivot Tables (repeat)

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: People familiar with spreadsheets and aggregating data with pivot tables, or anyone who has taken Excel 1-3.

Speaker

Paula Lavigne, ESPN 👇

Paula Lavigne has been an investigative reporter for ESPN since 2008, working for both digital and TV. She has a background in data journalism. Her work has been recognized with several awards including a Peabody, duPont and IRE's first sports investigation award. Prior to ESPN, she worked at newspapers in Dallas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Tacoma, Wash. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska and Creighton University.

On Twitter: @pinepaula

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Mapping Prejudice: Housing covenants research and community co-creation

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

Several groups across the country are unearthing and mapping racial housing covenants, tools used by real estate developers, homeowners and local officials to prevent people of color from buying or occupying property. Inspired by the idea that we cannot address the inequities of the present without an understanding of the past, Mapping Prejudice was created to expose the racist practices that reshaped the landscape of Minneapolis.

This research is showing what communities of color have known for decades. Structural barriers stopped many people who were not white from buying property and building wealth for most of the last century. Particularly since the murder of George Floyd, interest in racial covenants and structural racism has exploded, and there is an increased demand for digital tools to locate racial covenants at a much larger scale.

Community co-creation is a key strategy for Mapping Prejudice. Volunteers who transcribe racial covenants from primary source documents often report that engaging directly with this history transforms their understanding of structural racism. And the project strives to put the resources of the University of Minnesota at the service of the community, knowing that too often communities of color have experienced history research as primarily extractive.

Former data journalist Michael Corey, Mapping Prejudice's new technical lead, will discuss the project's history and technical workflow, what other projects are out there, and how journalists can help projects in their own communities. We'll also discuss Mapping Prejudice's roadmap for the next few years as the project expands to helping more communities and releases open-source OCR, crowdsourcing and GIS tools.

Speaker

Michael Corey, The Mapping Prejudice Project, University of Minnesota Libraries 👇

Michael Corey is the Geospatial, Technical and Data Lead for the Mapping Prejudice Project. Before transitioning to public history, Michael spent 20 years as a journalist and data journalist at the Star Tribune, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Des Moines Register. His previous work has spanned zoning and segregation, mortgage disparities, the U.S.-Mexico border fence system, human-induced earthquakes, and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

On Twitter: @mikejcorey

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Data deep dives: Phil Meyer winners

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 3:45 – 5 p.m. ET (75m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

A data deep dive into the 2021 Philip Meyer Award winners. Hear from reporters how they gathered, cleaned, analyzed and visualized the data behind some of the year's biggest stories.

Speakers

Rob Barry, The Wall Street Journal 👇

On Twitter: @rob_barry

Sarah Cohen, Arizona State University 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Andrew Ford, Arizona Republic 👇

On Twitter: @AndrewFordNews

Jeff Kao, ProPublica 👇

On Twitter: @jeffykao

Maya Miller, ProPublica 👇

Maya Miller is an engagement reporter at ProPublica working on community-sourced investigations.

On Twitter: @mayatmiller

Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times 👇

On Twitter: @luluramadan

Sessions starting at 5:15 p.m. ET

networking IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Virtual networking and closing

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

Description

Join this closing networking session to share your favorite parts of NICAR22, IRE's first hybrid NICAR conference. Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for people attending NICAR 2022 online.

Speaker

Madi Alexander, Dallas Morning News 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: TV and radio broadcasters

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A703 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for TV and radio broadcasters.

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Women

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A704 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for managers. All platforms and experience levels welcome.

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: LGBTQ+

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A706-707 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for anyone who identifies as part of the LGBTQIA+ community or as an ally.

Speakers

Josh Hinkle, KXAN 👇

On Twitter: @hinklej

Adam Rhodes, Chicago Reader 👇

On Twitter: @byadamrhodes

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Journalists of Color

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for journalists of color.

Speaker

Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th* 👇

Barbara Rodriguez is a reporter at The 19th, where she covers statehouses, local politics and gender. She currently serves on the IRE board of directors.

On Twitter: @bcrodriguez

networking IN-PERSON ONLY

Networking: Freelancers

🕙 Saturday (3/5) • 5:15 – 5:45 p.m. ET (30m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

Description

Mix and mingle, meet friends old and new, and build your professional community in this fun and informal networking session.

This session is for freelance journalists.

Speakers

Kristin Hussey, Independent journalist 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Dan Schwartz, Independent journalist 👇

On Twitter: @CODanSchwartz

Sunday, 3/6

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

demo IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Election 2022: Parsing FEC filings quickly

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 9 – 10 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

On campaign finance filing deadlines, journalists rush to sift through huge amounts of data on how much money campaigns have — and where it came from. In this talk, we will demo FastFEC, a new open source tool that rapidly parses these FEC filings, and showcase how its speed enabled our newsroom to create a serverless campaign finance data pipeline.

Speakers

Lenny Bronner, The Washington Post 👇

Lenny Bronner is a senior data scientist on The Washington Post’s Newsroom Engineering team. There he mostly works on election related data, including campaign finance, election results, voter registration and early vote data. He previously worked on The Post’s Big Data and Personalization team, focusing on natural language processing.

On Twitter: @lennybronner

Dylan Freedman, Washington Post 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 1: Intro to R and RStudio (Sunday repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 9 – 10 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Jump into data analysis with R, the powerful open-source programming language. In this class we’ll cover R fundamentals and learn our way around the RStudio interface for using R.

This session is good for: People with a basic understanding of code who are ready to go beyond Excel.

Speaker

MaryJo Webster, Star Tribune 👇

On Twitter: @MaryJoWebster

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Finding needles in haystacks with fuzzy matching (repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 9 – 10 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

Max Harlow, who developed the CSV Match command line tool, will show you how to run some of the different types of fuzzy matching on some real datasets, including the pros and cons of each.

This session is good for: People who feel comfortable using the command line.

Speaker

Max Harlow, Financial Times 👇

Max is part of the visual and data journalism team at the Financial Times in London, where he focuses on using data to find and tell investigative stories.

On Twitter: @maxharlow

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 1: Getting started with spreadsheets (repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 9 – 10 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: Data beginners.

Speaker

Yoohyun Jung, San Francisco Chronicle 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

panel IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

How to squeeze court records to get the most juice

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 9 – 10 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

📹 This session will be livestreamed.

Description

Whether you're on a beat, on an investigative team or at a research desk, court records are a resource you can't ignore. They are as valuable as they are difficult to access and analyze en masse. In this panel we'll talk about our myriad experiences getting these tricky troves to bear fruit for stories, as well as tips for finding and using them.

Speakers

Jennifer Forsyth, The Wall Street Journal 👇

Andrea Januta, Reuters 👇

Andrea Januta is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative and data reporter with Reuters in New York. Her work has focused on the U.S. court system, policing, the military and climate change. Before working in journalism, she was a data analyst at Goldman Sachs.

On Twitter: @andreajanuta

Charles Lane, WSHU 👇

Charles is senior reporter focusing on special projects. He has won numerous awards including an IRE Award, three SPJ Public Service Awards, a National Murrow, and he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and a Third Coast Director's Choice Award. In 2020 he reported the podcast Everytown which uncovered the plot to evict a group of immigrants from the Hamptons.

On Twitter: @_charleslane

Sessions starting at 10:15 a.m. ET

commons IN-PERSON ONLY

Career roundtable

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

Description

Whether it's a new investigation, a new beat or a new job, the choices we make early on can set us on the path to success — or ruin. This session will offer practical tips on changing gears or media, source-development and finding the story others have missed.

Speakers

Leah Dunn, WSB 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Willoughby Mariano, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

On Twitter: @wmariano

Brian Rosenthal, The New York Times 👇

On Twitter: @brianmrosenthal

demo IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Extending DocumentCloud to power advanced visualization, data gathering and analysis

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A601 (Atrium level)

📼 This session will be recorded for later viewing.

Description

For thousands of newsrooms, DocumentCloud is a trusted place to quickly store, analyze, and publish primary source materials, but its API means it can help you quickly bootstrap a wide range of projects, from scraping agency websites to setting up alerting systems to quickly training a new machine learning model to identify important documents within a massive collection. During this session we'll discuss advanced DocumentCloud usage via the API as well as a first look at a new plugin system that makes it easy to develop and maintain new document tools.

Speaker

Michael Morisy, MuckRock 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 2: Data analysis and plotting (Sunday repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: People who have worked with data operations in SQL or Excel and would like to do the same in R.

Speaker

MaryJo Webster, Star Tribune 👇

On Twitter: @MaryJoWebster

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel: Cleaning dirty data (repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: People with some experience working with data in columns and rows, in spreadsheets or database managers.

Speaker

Ben Welsh, Los Angeles Times/Big Local News at Stanford University 👇

On Twitter: @palewire

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 2: Formulas & sorting (repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: Anyone who is comfortable navigating Excel.

Speaker

Charles Minshew, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 👇

On Twitter: @charlesminshew

Sessions starting at 11:30 a.m. ET

IN-PERSON ONLY

Taking it all home

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: A602 (Atrium level)

Description

You've just spent the past three days absorbing as much information as possible and now it's time to go home and put it all to use. But where do you start? And how do you not immediately lose all that knowledge you just gained? Come to this session to get simple tips and tricks to bring it all home and put it to good use. You'll also learn how IRE can help you ride the NICAR wave long after Atlanta.

Speakers

Lauren Grandestaff, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Francisco Vara-Orta, IRE & NICAR 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

Cody Winchester, IRE & NICAR 👇

Cody Winchester is the senior training director at IRE & NICAR.

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

R 3: Gathering and cleaning data (Sunday repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L403 (Lobby level)

Description

Learn how to pull data into R through various means, including accessing APIs and web URLs. The session will also focus on how to clean and structure the data you’ve gathered in preparation for analysis using tidyverse packages.

This session is good for: People who have used R and have a basic understanding of how to retrieve data from APIs.

Speaker

MaryJo Webster, Star Tribune 👇

On Twitter: @MaryJoWebster

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel tricks you've never used

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L404 (Lobby level)

Description

Excel has so many tips, tricks and time-saving tools you might not know about, even if you're a whiz at CONCATENATE functions and PivotTables. You should pick up a few new tricks in this fast-paced and fun session.

This session is best for: Those with intermediate knowledge of spreadsheets.

Speaker

Caitlin McGlade, Arizona Republic 👇

Speaker bio coming soon!

hands-on IN-PERSON ONLY

Excel 3: Filtering & pivot tables (repeat)

🕙 Sunday (3/6) • 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET (60m)

🚪 Room: L402 (Lobby level)

Description

This session is good for: Anyone familiar with formulas, sorting and filtering in Excel or another spreadsheet program.

Speaker

Steven Rich , The Washington Post 👇

Steven Rich is the database editor for investigations at The Washington Post, a role he's been in for nine years. His work spans virtually every beat, but in recent years he's been primarily focused on policing and opioids. Rich served on IRE's board of directors for six years.

On Twitter: @dataeditor

Videos: Data training on demand

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Data viz on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn data visualization skills using Tableau. The lab includes 17 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* Data viz concepts: Which chart to use and why

* Tableau - Intro and overview of Tableau

* Tableau - Importing data

* Tableau - Building your first chart - bar chart

* Tableau - Filtering data

* Tableau - Line chart

* Tableau - Point maps

* Tableau - Building a basic choropleth map

* Tableau - Creating a calculated field

* Tableau - Dashboards

* Tableau - Publishing your viz (Public)

* Tableau - Publishing your viz (Desktop)

* Tableau - Advanced dashboards

* Tableau - Pivoting data

* Tableau - Joining data

* Tableau - Creating an animation with pages

* Tableau - Full project

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Data wrangling on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn data wrangling skills. The lab includes 8 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* PDF 1: Online tools to convert pdfs

* PDF 2: Using Tabula

* PDF 3: Command-line tools part 1

* PDF 3: Command-line tools part 2

* Cleaning up data in text editors with regular expressions

* Intro to command line for Mac

* Introduction to VisiData

* Parsing PDFs with Python

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Python on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn data wrangling skills. The lab includes 17 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* Python: Getting set up on your PC

* Python: Getting set up on your Mac

* Python for data analysis: Getting started with the pandas library

* Python: Introduction and basic syntax

* Python for data analysis: Loading and inspecting data in pandas

* Python: Data collections

* Python for data analysis: Sorting data in pandas

* Python: Control flow statements

* Python for data analysis: Column and row filtering in pandas

* Python for data analysis: Grouping data in pandas

* Web scraping with Python 1: Setting up a new scraping project

* Web scraping with Python 2: Requesting a web page

* Web scraping with Python 3: Parsing HTML into data

* Web scraping with Python 4: Writing results to file

* Web scraping with Python 5: Handling paginated results

* Web scraping with Python 6 (bonus!): Cleanup + a few best practices

* Intro to web scraping: Peeking under the hood of a website

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

R on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn data wrangling skills. The lab includes 10 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* R: Setting up R & RStudio

* R: Importing data

* R: Sorting and filtering data

* R: Analyzing & exporting data

* R: Building basic charts

* R: Advanced data analysis (think SQL functions in R)

* R: Cleaning data

* R: Pivoting data longer and wider

* R: Advanced styling of charts

* R: Sharing your analysis with others with RMarkdown

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Spreadsheets on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn spreadsheet skills using Google Sheets. The lab includes 16 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* Spreadsheet basics

* Formulas and functions

* Rates and ratios

* Sorting

* Filtering

* Intro to pivot tables

* Advanced pivot tables

* Importing (Sheets)

* Importing (Excel)

* Importing Excel PC using legacy wizard

* Cleaning tools and tricks

* Cleaning using string functions pt1

* Cleaning using string functions pt2

* Cleaning using string functions pt3

* Differences between Excel and Sheets

* Web scraping with Sheets

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

SQL on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn database skills using Structured Query Language (SQL). The lab includes 13 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* Concept overview: Introduction to Structured Query Language

* Tour and overview of DB Browser software

* Creating a database and importing data in DB Browser

* Selecting and ordering data (SELECT, FROM, ORDER BY)

* Filtering data

* Grouping and counting data

* Advanced filtering

* Concept overview: Joining relational data in SQL

* Joining relational databases

* Enterprise & inner joins

* Cleaning data in SQL

* Integrity checks and best practices in SQL

* Saving & exporting your work in DB Browser

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

hands-on: virtual lab IN-PERSON & VIRTUAL

Web scraping on-demand lab

🕙 On demand

Description

All attendees (virtual and in-person) will have access to this virtual lab designed to learn data wrangling skills. The lab includes 9 videos, from beginner to advanced, plus the data files needed and instructions to set up your computer.

Videos in this lab include:

* Intro to web scraping: Peeking under the hood of a website

* Web scraping with Python 1: Setting up a new scraping project

* Web scraping with Python 2: Requesting a web page

* Web scraping with Python 3: Parsing HTML into data

* Web scraping with Python 4: Writing results to file

* Web scraping with Python 5: Handling paginated results

* Web scraping with Python 6 (bonus!): Cleanup + a few best practices

* R: Web Scraping

* Spreadsheets: Web scraping with Sheets

🔊 Speaker details coming soon!

NICAR 2022 schedule

Thursday, 3/3

Sessions starting at 8:15 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 2 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 3:45 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 5:15 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 6 p.m. ET

Friday, 3/4

Sessions starting at 7:45 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 12:30 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 2 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 3:45 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 5 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 6:15 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 6:30 p.m. ET

Saturday, 3/5

Sessions starting at 8 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 11 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 2 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 3:45 p.m. ET

Sessions starting at 5:15 p.m. ET

Sunday, 3/6

Sessions starting at 9 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 10:15 a.m. ET

Sessions starting at 11:30 a.m. ET

Videos: Data training on demand