Getting up to speed

We’ll do normal first-day things, like talk about why we‘re all here and what we want. Class goals and policies, introductions, office hours, grading policies, project overview, configuring our laptops, signing up for tutorial and presenation duty. Finally, we’ll get inspired by some code we see online and use it for a quick demonstration.

Housekeeping

• Make sure your info is right on the wiki
• Are you sure you’ve signed up for the Google group?

Introduction

How Amanda Got Started Intern Delightful boxes The dots are real

How Kevin Got Started Grad school Intern Peaked

2013: The Year in Interactive Storytelling

Learn to think like Amanda or Kevin

Discussion:

• What do you all want to get out of the class?

• What kinds of jobs are you going to be looking for?

• What has been missing so far in your journalism education?

Getting your machines set up

1. Everyone should download a text editor to their laptop, if they have one.

For Mac users, we strongly recommend Sublime Text 2. It eventually costs $70, but you can use it for free for a while. (Kevin still uses the free version and he uses it every day.) Other alternatives include TextWrangler (free) or BBEdit (not free).

PC Users might consider Notepad++.

1. Next, we need to make sure Git is installed on all our computers. Here’s a helper. If you have a Mac, you probably have it installed already. We’ll do this together.

Signing up for Github

If you’ve never used Git or Github before, don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it may seem at first. It’s basically like Dropbox for programmers, with enough goofy names and concepts to make it all feel a little more complicated than it really is.

Using an online example.

Say you want to make an interactive map of the United States and you don’t know where to start, but you DO know what you want your map to look kind of like this one you’ve already seen.

What do we need to learn?

1. Using our terminal.
2. Starting a local server: python -m SimpleHTTPServer http://localhost:8000/
3. Gathering/scraping/transforming data.
4. How to join data to a map.
5. Some basic html and css.
6. Colors Colorbrewer
7. [optional: Rollovers]
8. Geography
9. Projections
10. Responsiveness.
11. Publish it.
12. Content
13. Right form
14. Thinking creatively about data Another
15. Even more creatively

Homework

Your assignment is to:

1. Gather data for a map (states, counties, or some other area you can find boundary information for.) You don’t want to make a map about population, so be sure you also gather a demoninator if you need it.