NYU — Fall 2014 / Week 5

Getting to know the 'black screen'

Thus far, we’ve gotten good at our core skills – sort, filter, merge and aggregate. But communicating that information on the internet is just as important. We’ll finish up last week’s data cleaning exercise, then get into some coding.

Housekeeping

From last week: finishing up your data join exercise.

We’ll finish our exercise from last time, which was supposed to be about learning that data isn’t perfect. (Instead, it devolved into a pivot table exercise, which is also just fine.)

No need to start from scratch; this excel file should get you on your way.

Goal: get a county fips code for at least 95% of all guns and counties. Making a pivot table if no_match and `guns' could help. Or just filter.

Basic HTML and CSS

You don’t necessarily need to know html and CSS to be successful journalist in 2014, but having a good understanding of how it works – and especially how to make or edit small things – will still be useful. Also, considering many of the people hiring you don’t know the difference between basic internet competency and a computer science degree, help keep them fooled as long as possible. (Part of this exercise is stolen/adapted from Code With Me, which has great lessons.)

  1. Make a folder for today’s class on your computer. Inside it, make a file called index.html. Open the file, write your name on it, and save it. Then open it in a web browser, and blamo!

  2. How might formatting help us here?

  3. Insert <html>, <head>, <title> and <body> tags to make your page valid. Tabs matter!

  4. Check out some sample content we may have written as a class based on our excel exercises. Paste it into the body of your HTML page, and let’s mark it up. You might want to use these docs as a reference.

  5. Style the content to look as much like NYT content as possible. Use the inspector!