Tech Camp – Meg Heckman

August 10, 2013August 10, 2013

A no-frills tool for awesome charts

For our final Summer Tech Camp, we’re tackling Chartbuilder — the simple tool that’s behind many of Quartz’s crisp, useful charts and graphs. As David Yanofsky writes, Chartbuilder has given “everyone in our worldwide newsroom 24-hour access to simple charts at graphics-desk quality. “

Now, that tool is available for even non-Quartz staffers to use. Here’s a chart I made showing the medal totals by country for the 2012 Summer Olympics:

To launch Chartbuilder, you’ll need to enter a few command lines into your computer’s terminal. You’ll find the lines here under “getting started.” As for the terminal, here’s where to look on a Mac:

PC users, you’re on your own. Just kidding. Try this set of instructions for opening the terminal in Windows 7.

Once you’re in the Chartbuilder interface, try playing around a bit with the pre-loaded data. Once you get a sense of how things work, try adding data of your own. Here are a few sample sets to get you started.

July 22, 2013July 22, 2013

Tech camp goes mobile

If the forecast is correct, this week will feature some really fantastic summer weather, so we’re going to head outside and see what kinds of stories we can tell with nothing more than our smartphones and a couple of apps.

We’ve already experimented with one of them: ThingLink. We used the desktop version earlier this summer, but now that it’s publicly available as an app, we can try to do something similar to what the Washington Post produced during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April.

Another fun little app I’ve been playing with lately is called Over, a super-simple tool that lets users place text and a limited selection of graphics over images. Here’s a graphic for an imaginary blog post about entertainment options in Boston. It took about five minutes, and that includes the time I spent walking down the block to take the picture.

For other examples of Over projects in the wild, check out this blog from the app’s developers.

Don’t forget your phone on Monday. (No smartphone? No problem. We’ll pair you up with someone who has one.)

July 15, 2013July 16, 2013

Google Fusion, revisited

During last week’s tech camp, we touched briefly on the way data is shaping how stories are told online. Today, we’ll explore that concept more deeply through Google Fusion Tables.

To use utterly unscientific terms, Fusion Tables are souped-up spreadsheets that superimpose — or fuse — information onto Google’s expansive mapping system. The finished products can be saved, shared and embedded on websites. Fusion also allows users to create simple charts, timelines and other data visualizations. Our focus, however, will be on building interactive maps. (Read this for a few reasons why mapping is important to modern digital storytelling.)

Once you learn the basics of Fusion, it’s possible to create a fairly sophisticated project in less than 30 minutes. Still, the process can be a little intimidating at first. Here are step-by-step instructions to help you along, and here are the three things you need for a successful project:

1.) A goal. What do you hope to achieve? What do you want to help readers understand? What do you know? What do you ned to know? Will this be a stand-alone map or part of a broader package?

2.) Valid data that can be manipulated using geography. The simplest example is a list of addresses, like in this table I made showing a few visits to New Hampshire by possible 2016 presidential candidates. Here’s another example that shows the location of stalled construction in New York City.

(A note about validity: Data shouldn’t be treated any differently than other kinds of information we handle as journalists. In other words, verify, contextualize and cite properly.)

3.) Shape files. These are necessary only for projects in which you want to show highlighted geographic areas, as opposed to pins. They contain boundary information for common geographic areas like states, provinces, countries and counties. To see what I mean, check out this project by the Guardian. The pins were dropped using basic address information, while the colored patches relied on shape files for geographic areas. (We’ll cover where to find the shape files and how to make them different colors during camp.)

Finally, here’s the tutorial we’ll be using together on Monday. It’s far less complicated than it looks. Promise!