Blog Data Stories Moving Stories Written Stories Teaching Resume My Data-Driven Philosophy

Michelle Minkoff

=SUM (Passion + journalism + data + technology)

Teaching

Every time members of the data community help me, and I ask what I can do in return — what I hear most often is “Pay it forward.”  That’s obviously something people like Derek Willis, Ben Welsh and many, many others believe in strongly.

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.  Enjoy, and of course, let me know if you have questions!

NICAR 2011 – Raleigh, North Carolina (February 2011) – First conference as a full professional!

  • 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.  Soon: I’ll put the exercises online.
  • 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.