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)

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.