The annual US National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR) conference brings together hundreds of some of the most experienced data journalists, mainly US-based, and is packed with sessions where you can learn about the latest developments, tools and techniques in the field. Since I didn’t make it to NICAR last week, I followed the most used conference hashtag, #NICAR13, to stay on top of the discussions. The abundance of sessions and presentations at NICAR makes it impossible for anyone to absorb everything that is being discussed, so here is a list of the most tweeted links from the conference, which might be useful to come back to. (Unfortunately I missed capturing tweets from the first day of the conference.)
The by far most popular link is Chrys Wu’s Tools, Slides and Links from NICAR13, a long list of presentations, tutorials, software, tools, references and work samples discussed in the conference. The other top links are:
- Highlights from NICAR’s “Year in CAR” presentation by the Knight Lab
- Could you be a medallist? Find out with our brilliant retro interactive by the Guardian
- MuckRock, a tool which makes it easy to file Freedom of Information requests
- List of tipsheets and tutorials from the conference compiled by the organisers, Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE)
- FOIA Machine, an alpha tool for automating FOIA requests
- Hadley Wickham’s Data science for nerdy journalists/Introduction to R slides and code
- The picture of the thriving data journalism jobs board at NICAR
- Sisi Wei’s slides from the “Let’s make games for news” talk
- Beware of data – cautionary tips and tales of statistics, from the IRE conference blog.
Another list of highlights, curated by one of the conference participants, can be found on the Nieman Lab website.