If you have ever opened the U.S. Census website looking for tract-level data, you know how quickly things can get overwhelming. Tables, codes, geographies, shapefiles, downloads: before you even ask a question, you are already having to decide which tools you need to answer it. Inspired by a video explainer by Kyle Walker, this tutorial
If the only things you’re doing on bluesky are scrolling, liking and posting, then you are still riding a bike with training wheels. Hear me out. There are several simple and free tools out there that let you take advantage of bluesky’s secret weapon: its open-source skeleton. A how-to A few firehose ideas: First, you’re probably
One of the biggest challenges working with text data is the many different ways that people can enter the exact same information. A human knows that “St. Lucie, Florida,” “Saint Lucie, FL,” and “St Lucy, Florida” are probably all the same place, but a computer doesn’t. “Fuzzy” matching pulls similarities between the letters in words and
Many people think of R as a way to visualize data, but it can also be a useful tool to explore datasets and seek possible story ideas. At the 2023 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, Charles Minshew, the digital storytelling editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, walked through using basic R code to question datasets. Knowing
