Open government data, FOIA request results, and even just walking around the neighborhood all give us data to tell a new story or create a cool visualization. But rarely does the data come in an easy-to-use format.
Join Hacks/Hackers and the Online News Association on Oct. 8 to learn three ways to make that intractable data useful.
Presenters:
Noah Veltman is a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the BBC. He’s done a lot of neat data projects including a map of the history of street names in San Francisco, which involved *gasp* calling actual human beings to gather all his data. Noah is currently working on opening up the street history project for other cities, like Philly.
Manuel Aristarán is a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow at La Nacion on Buenos Aires, Argentina. He’s working on a tool called Tabula that extracts tabular data from PDFs. Tabula helps solve the frustrating problem of accessing data trapped in PDFs.
A team of mapping enthusiasts ran a couple of balloon mapping workshops this spring and summer to get a birds-eye view of places in the region. They then used an open source tool from the Public Labto compile photographs of the area.