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 class roster
• 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

Way too many projects from 2014

Discussion, part 1

• 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?

Readings

Every week we’ll talk about one or two pieces of journalism we’ve read or seen and discuss them, with a student leading the discussion. We’ll do some random drawings to keep it interesting (for you and us). Today, Amanda and Kevin will lead the discussion about the pieces we asked you to read before class, all about deflategate:

Sharp Football Analysis

Sosh Central

Regressing

Advanced NFL Analytics

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