Fire up a server in Amazon's cloud and deploy http://tinyurl.com/hellonewsroom -- all in less time than it takes to make me a sandwich.

They aren't interactive. They don't impress trendy developers. But they make a point. (And they'll work in IE 6). In this talk I'll show you how you can use Django and Google Charts to get your Tufte on.

I could show how handily R allows you to munge data or do exploratory data graphics -- whichever this audience requests.

Want to use an API to fetch data but don't have much programming experience? You can start with Excel. I'll show you how using the NYT Congress API.

Use ProPublica's new open source tools (to be released at NICAR) TableFu and TableSetter to create full featured data apps using Google Spreadsheets. We'll take a data set, copy and paste it into Google Spreadhseets, and publish it on the actual internets. And somebody will time us.

Five SQL queries you may have never tried that will save you time and maybe alter the universe as you know it. With handout.

Tableau public takes on ManyEyes

If you know some HTML and CSS, Javascript is a great next step to complete your triangle of web savvy. It'll help bring broadly-compatible interactivity to your news site. I'll show you some tricks with the Google Visualization API -- dynamic graphs even work on the iPhone and some other mobile devices!

Roll through a seven-step process to vet sources, local political candidates, executives and other people of interest.

Open Flash Charts is an easy way to make interactive Flash charts and it's all free. I'll show you a tool allowing any reporter to make a basic one just by typing in the values, and get an embed link to paste into the CMS system with the story

Pretty simple introduction to the basic concepts of Ruby.

You'll learn how to install Sun's Virtualbox and Ubuntu on your PC. Virtualbox is also available for OSX so this won't be just a PC talk. If time permits you'll also learn about Webmin, a web based GUI for management of Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL and more.

Use simple wiki tools to organize long-term investigative projects and breaking news resources. Works especially well for newsrooms stressing cross-platform collaboration and editing.

Journalism's role in online open government.

If you've got geographical data in a django app, why not hook it into an augmented reality application for iPhones and Android phones, allowing people to walk down the street looking into their camera phone and see the buildings in front of them... with your data on top?

If people are interested, I can give some student perspective as well as suggestions for journalists teaching CAR classes. Ten weeks last fall took me from never having heard of the field to pursuing a new career path with vigor.

Build an online data lookup in minutes using a template and the DataGrid PHP class

A few lines of pasted code--with almost no programming knowledge or time required--can turn an HTML table of data in your article into various forms of dynamic graphs.

A handful of simple, but powerful, Linux-based shell commands -- that can run under Windows and Mac -- for joining voluminous text files, doing universal search-and-replacing and scraping URLs.

When your dropdown options on database lists get too long, you can use easy jquery AJAX libraries to instead suggest values as the user types. It's fast and foolproof for them, easy for you with a little bit of code.

Share files for projects across newsrooms, bureaus, classrooms, etc. It's a cinch.

We've seen them on NICAR-L over and over again: Paste Special, text-to-columns, trim and left/right/mid functions.

CAR is a great way to enhance a news story, but can it do more? Can it provide insights impossible to understand through traditional reporting? Is there a visualization for the Bernie Madoff story? How about the recent change in breast cancer screening recommendation? Can existing visualizations be supplemented to provide even more information for the news reader? What will CAR look like in 5, 10 or 20 years? And with that vision, what can we do today to make it a reality?

Want to convert a Web site with hundreds of pages of information into a structured database--without hours of tedious copying and pasting, and with very little computer coding necessary?

Want to access your code snippets from anywhere? A wiki might be your answer. (This from a dedicated wiki hater.)

Who files them? Where do you get them? What do they tell you?

High-powered algorithms like Latent Semantic Analysis are simpler than they sound and can be applied to nearly anything, whether it's a document, a politician's voting record or a set of numbers. Let's use a Python library to identify campaign contributors with nearly identical giving patterns--and find out what else they have in common.

Learn how the Los Angeles Times publishes documents, spreadsheets, campaign contributions and more using the cloud service developed by Python author Guido van Rossum's team at Google. You will walk out with dreams of a life without server crashes -- and a bucket of free code.

St. Petersburg, FL

Deploying your app is hard. Learn how to use services like Djangy, ep.io and others to handle deployments for you -- and you won't even have to remember which pocket you put your ticket in!

New York Times Regional Media Group

St. Petersburg, FL

Huge traffic bogging down your site? Well, look no further than the Here's-How-Jeff-Larson-Told-Me-To-Do-This Varnish setup! A fast setup that even I could understand. I'll show you how to quickly install and set it up on a server, some dirty VCL code, what to throw on your Django views and some basic varnish commands. And BAM! CPU load from 99 percent to 3 percent.

Want to help your audience pull out the info they care about most from the data you post online? I'll show you how to use the JQuery plugin DataTables to make your online tables searchable, sortable and paginated -- no databases or hardcore programming required.

Let's go beyond mapping. Free software and code libraries that will help you understand the spatial nature of your data.

San Francisco, CA

This free add-in to Excel 2007 and 2010 makes SNA easy. It also allows you to query the APIs of social media services including Twitter to draw networks of users discussing particular terms.

Tired of looping through CSV files in order to do data imports? See how using ActiveRecord Extensions speeds up imports of large files and does smart updates to SQL databases.

Two low-cost software utilities we use at the Times to quickly grab tabular data from PDF files will be demonstrated.

A really quick overview of how to work with Military Grid Reference System coordinates found in military reports.

Social Network Analysis - overview of available analysis software, visualization software and a couple of examples of stuff that has been done.

Brief introduction of advances in geospatial and agent based modeling, along with some examples of how it is being used and the data behind it. Example: http://vimeo.com/3937449

St. Petersburg, FL

News artists and designers need you for good graphic and map ideas. And you need them so the project you worked so hard on doesn't come out looking terrible. I'll share some tips for working with the visual types in your newsroom for projects both online and in print.

Can't get your hands on event data? Collect it yourself! Learn how The Washington Square News used reporters with iPhones at the Quidditch (yes, Quidditch) World Cup to collect data for real-time visualizations of game matches. nyunews.com/quidditch/

The evil PR guy gave you a PDF that's locked so you can't copy text? You can break the lock with the simple, free command-line utility qpdf.

Are you coding html tables by hand in order to get the exact code you want? Our Web production team was; but an internal tool written in PHP has since cut hours from that process. This would be a brief demo of the internal tool and showing how you can modify the code for your own needs.

Document Armaggeddon! Comparing billions of documents to find copycats, cheaters and thieves

San Francisco, CA

Ok, so maybe "billions" is a stretch in practice -- but not in theory! This talk will demonstrate how to use a few lines of Python and Amazon's Elastic MapReduce framework to scan through an arbitrarily large set of documents and find those that are similar. We used it to find recycled bills from previous sessions of the California State Legislature, but the applications are endless.

Want to make custom thematic maps without Flash? Learn how the Los Angeles Times uses GeoDjango and the Raphael JavaScript library to create interactive, vector based maps that load in everything from IE7 to an iPad.

The computer systems we use every day are filled to the brim with hacks, bugs, and weird decisions. Let me take you on a tour of why nothing works. I'll crash my computer by the end, that's a promise.

You could spend time and treasure building the perfect caching system for your news app (and then stay up all night worrying about it). Or you could flatten your database app into static files and serve it cheap and easy. Learn the Data Desk way to break news without breaking a server.

Node.js only has a couple good use cases. One of them is web scraping. Since you already know jQuery, Underscore and the DOM, it's more natural to scrape with JavaScript than the equivalent Ruby or Python libraries. Learn how tools like jsdom make it simple to scrape sites, even if you need to grab evaluated source.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Whether you are a reporter starting on a story or a developer taking on a new app, how you approach it from the very beginning stages of the idea shapes how it will turn out. Believe it or not, Zen Buddhism has some advice on how you should approach your data app or investigative series. And it has something to do with tea.

This presentation will be nothing but pictures of cats! Cute cats, fat cats, skinny cats! Cats! Cats! Cats! Oh, but how about kittens you ask? Will this presentation include kittens? Yes! Kittens and cats!

Those of us who build News Apps usually scorn the CMS, yet this often comes at the cost of traffic to our own sites. This talk will look at some strategies of pushing app promos into the CMS at the NYT and elsewhere.

Wanna build an API? Sure, we all do. Practical TastyPie will focus on best practices and lessons learned from deploying APIs serving millions of records and hundreds of millions of requests at the Washington Post.

We know how to look at content and see a database model, we're willing to rebuild systems in our own image, and we're used to making things useful for readers. We're also lazy, so we make things as simple and automated as possible. I'll give a quick walkthrough of how we used our news nerd powers to pitch and build a flexible mobile advertising system that doesn't suck.

Dan Brown's next novel? No, It's what makes LISP and JavaScript and Scala wonderful. And it's also a way to represent human language. And it's even related to how we use SQL to query data sets.

Nothing goes together better than coffee and code do. CoffeeScript makes writing JavaScript much nicer. This simple demo shows off a little code in both languages and an example coffeescript workflow.

San Francisco, CA

The polite programming language you have been waiting for is coming soon. Learn what the folks at ILENE Laboratories are working on. pls indicate a most positive vote now tu

Recent changes in government accounting standards allow journalists to determine how much money government agencies are piling up in reserves in a way they couldn't do before. Here's how it works.

Version control, code-sharing, geek networking - get it all in one convenient, (mostly) free package.

So you need to build a production MongoDB infrastructure. But the docs are atrocious! See: The horror of the monsterous configuration node! Hear: The wails of improperly sharded collections! Smell: The piquant scent of an undocumented REST API! We'll have a fully replicated and sharded architecture working in less than 5 minutes.

Don't know the difference between an inner and outer join? After 10 minutes, you will. And I'll throw in some cool tips you can use with your favorite database manger, such as using JOINs instead of a WHERE clause and to find pesky orphaned data. We may even have time for questions and pictures of Aron's cat.

Lots of new tools are cropping up every day. Learning techniques are good, learning how to learn them are better. I'll share five not-so-secret secrets that can help us work more efficiently, bring the dreams in our heads to life, and(hopefully) keep us from going totally insane in the process.

Missouri School of Journalism

Like it or not, much of the data we need is kept offline by government agencies, out of the reach of your fancy-schmancy programming languages. Learn how you can uncover info about hundreds of data sets in your state with a little charm and persistence.

Database backup tools kinda suck. But a SQL dump is just a text file. What if we stashed that in a git repo? Then we'd have a versioned, distributed backup. Until Github shuts down my account.

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

You don't need a PhD to be part of the Fulbright program. Accomplished professionals with skills like yours are in demand around the world. Learn what it takes to apply and be selected for a chance to live and teach up to a year in some exotic place, with a stipend and living expenses covered.

St. Petersburg, FL

Save some newsroom wrists by creating on-demand downloads of styled text.
What can be delivered? Any text your web app can produce.
Examples: tables of election results or sports scores, crime calls, event calendars, movie listings, restaurant lists.
This approach uses a Django framework and assumes the recipient is using InDesign or InCopy.
Could be adapted for other frameworks and print design software (Quark?).

Design usually takes a back seat to data crunching — after all, slick gradients never exposed speeding cops or slimy politicians, right? But following a few basic rules of thumb can help ensure that your cold hard facts have clarity, impact, and accessibility. I'll share a few tips that are easy to implement but make a big difference to your audience.

Demo of a quick way to build an HTML table, ready to be placed on a web page, from an Excel spreadsheet. I'll show an Excel plugin to easily export a spreadsheet in JSON, a format readily used on Web pages, and how to incorporate it with a jQuery plugin to make a sortable HTML table. Yes, it can be done in 5 minutes!

I will use cutting edge cut and paste techniques to geocode addresses in a Google spreadsheet. No programming, no code, one simple formula. Cut, paste, click. If someone brings a toddler, he or she can demonstrate and this talk will still take less than two minutes.

As our methodologies become more complex, it becomes increasingly important that analytic journalists maintain their "lab book" of who did what to what, when and how. NoteSync is a great little pop-up tool for making those notes, syncing them straight-away to Google Docs and, there, share them with colleagues or access them from any browser. Cost? $5!

Columbia University School of Journalism

Five browser extensions you should use every day across both Firefox and Chrome.

Investigative Reporting Workshop

In some cases, it makes sense for news organizations to outsource parts of their data and application building functions. Tips on working with consultants in a news environment, including setting parameters, payment, deadlines.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

The challenge is how to make information contained in scrapped PDF's, text or numbers, usefull in terms of accessibility and/or handling.

You've taken some programming classes and know about variables, forms and functions. Now where do you start hacking? Get up and running quickly in a familiar environment with the WordPress plugin API. Built-in hooks and SQL calls make it simple to rejigger the world's most popular CMS however you see fit: geocode posts, curate twitter feeds, and otherwise make your blog/news site do stuff it didn't before. Caution: PHP ahead.

A great alternative to having to go to an RSS reader, FeedMyInBox takes RSS updates and sends them, in digest form, to your email inbox. Makes for easy access and fast scanning.

Columbia University School of Journalism

5 Apps that you should open before 7am each morning.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Wikipedia is great for "notable" subjects, but what if you want a wiki for your City Council or Planning Commission? The unstructured source data is out there, and Wisci helps users understand and use that data. Wisci builds on top of an advanced statistical inference engine and extracts meaning from the underlying data. We'll demonstrate how Wisci extracted information from terabytes of video, legislative documents, OCRed scans, webcrawls and news article archives for Madison, WI to assist in the creation of a Madison politics and government wiki.

Columbia University School of Journalism

A talk on five twitter chats that everyone should know about, participate in, and love.

Hamburg, Germany

With a cheap tool usually used by Webworkers, you can easily see what data comes in and out your (i)phone (and its apps). Also, you can "hack" google map apps and other stuff very fast. And did i tell you all data is searchable? And replayable? Also, its easy and fun.

Five algorithms from the data science world that will help you kick ass on the data journalism circuit. But wait, there's more! This presentation will be accompanied by a Github repo with working code and examples of journalistic applications.

Django Retrained: Five ways coding like a Web developer can make you a better investigative reporter

It is the news that should fear your hand, not the other way around.

I have 5 minutes to show you how to predict elections. And I'll do it.

They are always pointing out shit that has nothing to do with function, always up in your grill about some tiny tweak here, some UX improvement there. Who needs them?!? Actually, we do -- badly. Give us five minutes, and we'll show four practical examples of how design thinking has improved our work, and could improve your's too. Also, we'll show cute cats.

When presenting huge data stories, make sure your mobile users aren't left out or forced to load massive datasets. Using WaPo's 2012 mobile election results as an example, I'll talk about creating lightweight data-driven web apps and tailoring the experience for mobile.

Sometimes you want your readers to pop potato chips for hours in a room with no windows but plenty of free drinks. Ditch Mechanical Turk, and embrace Casino Driven Design. We've had readers practice "natural" language processing on up to 25,000 PDFs a head in our casino, and yours can too!

Want to make a news game with your data? I'll show you the exact 4 requirements on how to make a successful one. [Warning. News games are not gamification. They're real games.]

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Ever wanted to do a story that needed data that no one kept? What if you could create your own data gathering machines? You can. Cheap. And easy. How hardware hacking is the next data journalism skill.

A school has 23.8 students per classroom and average SAT score of 2050, and an attendance rate of 93.5 percent. By standardizing disparate values with z-scores, you can more precisely compare variables that are on different scales and build better indexes.

Practically every state has its own weird quirks in elections, and I saw them all in 2012. If I'm inspired enough (and can speak fast enough), I'll say all 50. One every 10 seconds. This will be hard.

How Romeo and Juliet, cheap index cards, robots and root beer floats can teach students how to code. I’ll share the successes (and failures) from our workshops, and in 5 minutes leave you armed with new teaching tools.

San Francisco, CA

Kindly come learn about the best and most polite language for use in programming activities...ever developed. Thank you. (Featuring The Jeff Larson)

The Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew, a funky group of volunteer developers who aim to be as diverse as Chicago, has built a scraper and API for inmate data in the nation's largest jail. Learn about the project, the many failures that preceded it, and why this one is succeeding.

Heard about responsive design but not sure how it works? Embarrassed at the water cooler when everyone's all "Seriously, could you *believe* that max-width 768 on NPR yesterday? So badass."? I'll build a stupid simple live demo from scratch, you'll leave knowing how CSS can target common screen widths. So basic, no talking required.

You want to keep tabs on changes to a website, but Versionista.com and other out-of-the-box services aren't cutting it. I'll show you how to roll your own quickly using Git's post-receive hooks and your programming language of choice.

People are getting bored with infographics. Symphographics are the new hot shit. Michael and Brian will show off their data-driven dance music with csv soundsystem and how sound can bring out narratives in data. Featuring the first ever live symphographic mashup.

This presentation will take a whirlwind tour through your options for "diffing" two similar text files. I'll present the pros, cons, and in-the-wild examples.

Crime is down everywhere, right? Maybe not. I'll show you how to dig into your city or county's FBI crime data to see if it's bogus or not.

Hamburg, Germany

Contrary to many Websites Apps have "unlimited" APIs - no Captcha, no throtteling or access limits. I'll show how to find them -even for beginners.

How did voters for Obama or Romney vote for mayor of your city? How did different demographic groups vote in your area's races? Here's how to use ecological inference to estimate answers.

Think D3js is just about SVG? There's much more to it than just that. A helpful overview of stuff you'll want to use in every interactive.

Your whistle stop guide to splitting big processing tasks into tiny pieces, running them in parallel and then combining the results. World domination optional.