Project Show-N-Tell

Bring your ready-to-talk about projects to share with the class.

A writeup of the final project requirements.

Have you been faithfully recording time-based events related to your story but are looking for ways to visualize them? Try out the Knight Lab's TimelineJS, which lets you turn a Google Spreadsheet into an embeddable interactive timeline, like so:

1033 Redux

Remember the 1033 Program data that we looked at for the midterm? If you recall correctly, it revealed the distribution of military surplus only at the county level, but not which agencies actually got them. That's recently changed, partly in thanks to the persistent records-requesting of MuckRock. You can get the raw data from the Pentagon here.

Check out how The Marshall Project wrote a data story about it: The Pentagon Finally Details its Weapons-for-Cops Giveaway.

It works as a traditional story, but it dives deep into the details of the data:

You probably have not heard about some of the more obscure beneficiaries of the Pentagon giveaway: This piece was reported and written by Tom Meagher and Gabriel Dance for The Marshall Project and by Shawn Musgrave of MuckRock, an independent investigative news site. Subscribe to MuckRock's newsletter, or follow it on Twitter.

• Police in Johnston, R.I., with a population less than 29,000, acquired two bomb disposal robots, 10 tactical trucks, 35 assault rifles, more than 100 infrared gun sights and two pairs of footwear designed to protect against explosive mines. The Johnson police department has 67 sworn officers.
• The parks division of Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources was given 20 M-16 rifles, while the fish and wildlife enforcement division obtained another 20 M-16s, plus eight M-14 rifles and ten .45-caliber automatic pistols.
• Campus police at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, received 12 M-16s to help protect the 8,811 students there (or perhaps to keep them in line).
• The warden service of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife received a small aircraft, 96 night vision goggles, 67 gun sights and seven M-14 rifles.

The first visualization, a column-chart, is not fancy, but it gets the point across. And the second is basically a giant table. But in my opinion, this works, and is a great model for combining data-reporting with the traditional narrative article.