October 17th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, Journalism, Presentations
If you happened to be at the recent Online News Association conference in Boston and happened to attend the session on covering the 2012 elections, then a good bit of this will be repetitive. Since there wasn’t a ton of time to expand on what I said, and I don’t want to leave the impression [...]
October 4th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Car Tools, Data, Ruby
Assuming you regularly work with data found online – and if you don’t, you’re probably here by mistake, so welcome! – then you realize what a pain it can be to grab structured files from some site, save them and import them. I have more methods in more apps than I can count that download [...]
May 1st, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, IRE, Journalism
To my mother’s regret, I was never the literature lover she is. And I am not remotely the writer I might have been expected to be, given that my parents both taught English, one at the high school level and the other at college. I also am not the most graceful of interviewers, as my [...]
March 28th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in API, Data, Presentations
If you’re in D.C. on April 12 and are interested in government records, you may want to consider attending the Media Access to Government Information Conference (MAGIC) being held at National Archives building on Pennsylvania Ave. I’ll be one of the panelists there, but don’t let that dissuade you; there are far brighter people who [...]
March 11th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data
At the invitation of David Karger and his team at MIT, I’ve been playing around with the WordPress plugin for Exhibit to do some basic data visualizations on this blog. I got a chance to meet and talk to Karger in Raleigh last month and hear about his work on Exhibit and other projects. Here’s [...]