Every time members of the data and programming community help me, and I ask what I can do in return — what I hear most often is “Pay it forward.” It’s a mantra I pursue with obsessive fervor.
There’s much I’m still learning, but below are slides, tipsheets, notes and whatever else I make when I get the opportunity to “pay it forward” in classroom or conference settings. Perhaps they’ll help you, just as so many other people help me. Enjoy!
NICAR 2012 – St. Louis, Missouri (February 2012)
- Taught sessions on mapping with Raphael and Leaflet (for US rollover SVG maps and interactive zoomable mapping), as well as updated panel and hands-on session for Web scraping without programming. Links to all materials are at this blog post.
ONA 2011 – Boston, Massachusetts (September 2012)
- Co-led a session on data visualization. Walked attendees through basics of making a stacked bar chart on deadline using Google Charts. Tutorial here. Slides here. Bonus charting tipsheet.
NICAR 2011 – Raleigh, North Carolina (February 2011)
- Almost Scraping: Web Scraping for Non-Programmers Panel – Matt Wynn of the Omaha World-Herald and I will be discussing tools that’ll help you mine data from the Web to create your own usable data sets for reporting and/or presentation. Key tools are bookmarked here. Grab a tipsheet explaining said tools. Soon: Peruse our presentation that we gave at the actual conference.
- Almost Scraping Hands-On Lab – We’ll dive deep into two of the tools mentioned above, and walk through some exercises showing you how to use them. Walkthrough found here.
- Making HTML Tables Interactive – I’ll give my third five-minute Lightning Talk on how to use the jQuery DataTables plugin to make your HTML table interactive. Oftentimes, we think a database is needed to let people drill to a record that matters to them. But sometimes that can be accomplished by making it possible for them to search your table. Slides as well as a more in-depth walkthrough will be posted here as soon as possible.
IRE 2010 – Las Vegas, Nevada
- This presentation focuses more on the philosophy of how we approach database applications, and lessons I learned in my first three months interning at the LA Times. The fact that it’s a five-minute Lightning Talk explains the brevity.
NICAR 2010 – Phoenix, Arizona
- I gave a five-minute Lightning Talk giving a quick intro to Javascript, and explaining how you can create quick, interactive charts using the Google API. Slides and a more detailed walkthrough are here.
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