Banquo/src/banquo.js at master · ajam/banquo. The Code Behind AJAM's Displaced Syrians App. Al Jazeera America’s Michael Keller introduces three new libraries Last week we published a project entitled “Where would 7 million displaced Syrians fit?”
Which aimed to reframe the Syrian humanitarian crisis for a U.S. audience. We did this by visually showing how much space the more than seven million Syrians affected by the war would take if they were in different parts of the country. We calculated this using 2010 Census tract population. To show how the impact varies based on population density, we picked a few cities—in New York for instance, the population fills almost all five boroughs—and three more rural county areas, where the population spreads across multiple states. The trouble was, these six places showed the general idea to readers but there were probably a number of other interesting views of the data.
Four reader-submitted maps Some of their responses were really enlightening and changed how we saw part of the story. We released three libraries written in Node.js: An Open Source Bot Factory. If Huginn is a good enough agent for Odin (Norse god pictured above), why not for a news apps team too?
(Wikimedia Commons) How the New York Times Interactive team uses Huginn agents Huginn is an open-source project built with Ruby on Rails that’s kind of like an open-source If This Then That. With it you can create automated agents and schedule them to do different tasks at different times. More powerfully, these agents can talk to each other–passing JSON data from one step to the next. In short, it’s kind of like a bot factory. Here on the Interactive News team at the New York Times, we’ve started running an instance of Huginn to send us alerts and update emails about a variety of things. Huginn comes in handy to monitor web pages for changes and send an email with any changes to the content.
You can also use it to keep tabs on competitors or sources. Olympics Monitoring. Developing Data Journalists in the Developing World. Internews fellow Daniel Cheseret’s news app on healthcare investment in Kenya Eva Constantaras on training data journalists where data journalism isn’t a standard practice Journalists outside the U.S. and Western Europe face a myriad of challenges to doing data journalism, developing an audience for it, and growing a thriving civic-minded data community.
In Nicaragua and Kenya, no laws guarantee access to the kind of information that could have enriched recent election reporting in those countries. In Afghanistan, radio is still the main media channel and rates of digital and data literacy are low, which forces data-driven journalists to create new ways of telling data stories. In Nepal and Sri Lanka, there is little or no tradition of investigative reporting, doubling the skill sets journalists would need to learn to make data-driven stories. Learning - Source: An OpenNews project. Learning data Gender, Twitter, and the Value of Taking Things Apart Jake Harris reverse-engineers Twee-Q to evaluate its use of data (and see if his ratio is as disappointing as Twee-Q says it is) Learning process Security for Journalists, Part Two: Threat Modeling By Jonathan Stray.
Code Index - Source: An OpenNews project. Booktype Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any e-reader.
CartoDB CartoDB is an open-source platform to map, analyze and build apps with your data in the cloud. Chicago Flu Shots Web app that shows the location of flu shot clinics in Chicago, using data from the Chicago Department of Public Health, a Google Fusion Table, and the Google Maps API. mapping, JavaScript D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. JavaScript DocumentCloud DocumentCloud allows journalists working on document related projects to upload, analyze, annotate, and publish primary source material. What We Learned from the First-Ever OpenNews Code Convening. The things we planned and the unexpected bonuses of working together When we talk with newsrooms about open-sourcing their work, often the response we get is that they’d love to, but deadline pressures keep the last-mile work and documentation that signifies a good open-source project on the to-do list.
So at OpenNews, we came up with a simple proposition: What if we free up that time by getting developers out of the deadline grind? Let’s put them up for a few days, feed them, and help get the work done. Source - Journalism Code, Context & Community - A project by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. Source: journalism code, community, and context.