In early April, a group of developers and journalists announced the release of a new open-source tool to combat the scourge of public data trapped inside PDFs. Tabula is still in its early stages, but its lead developer says big changes are coming. Read More »
Bill Adair, creator and editor of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning PolitiFact, has been appointed the Knight Professor of Computational Journalism at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Read More »
Former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger said that before he retired the paper in late 2007, each investigative story cost up to $500,000. Figuring out how to foot that bill is important, but so is thinking about how to reduce it in the first place. Read More »
Extracting data from Web pages and online databases, also known as scraping, is often a code-intensive process. But we’ve tested two user-friendly programs that can help reporters get online data without doing a lot of the dirty work. Read More »
North Carolina lawmakers are considering a bill that would criminalize a public official’s failure to release public information. Fifteen other states already classify record law violations as misdemeanors, but it might not be the prescription for opening up government. Read More »
Since we launched the lab, our biggest challenge has been finding ways to get better tools into more journalists’ hands. It’s a tough problem, but research on open-source success is giving us more insight into what works. Read More »
On a recent episode of the Spark Tech Talk podcast, the lab’s managing editor moderates a discussion among experts in electronic privacy and security — an area growing more and more important for journalists both home and abroad. Read More »
In more than a dozen sessions at the 2013 Computation + Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech, speakers covered a range of topics from the origins of “precision journalism” to the reporting implications of Google’s Project Glass. Here were my big takeaways. Read More »
A new open-source program from the Raleigh Public Record aims to pull structured data from scanned public records — and developers are still looking for testing help from journalists and open-government advocates. Read More »
A month before hundreds of tech-savvy journalists gather in Louisville for the 2013 Computer Assisted Reporting Conference, a different melding of the minds more than 300 miles away will focus on the role computing will play in data journalism’s future. Read More »
Testing
Testing