Like many journalists who first learned about Tableau Public software last winter, we've been mightily impressed by not only its under-the-hood magic, but by the company's aggressive training outreach efforts. In May, for example, the IAJ was doing some extensive training for journalists at the Univ. of Central Lancashire and Vision+Media in Manchester's "Media City." We were fortunate to be able to enlist the assistance of Mel Stephenson of The Data Studio, a real pro at both using and teaching the rich applications in Tableau.

Another opportunity is in the offing: the Tableau Customer Conference scheduled for Oct. 17-20 in Las Vegas. It's not cheap (early registration is US$1,150), but it's one of those events like the ESRI User Conference or the Special Libraries Association annual meeting that can generate tremendous ROI for journalists who are working aggressively to survive in the highly dynamic datasphere.

The National Inst. of  Justice was one of the early adopters of GIS perspectives and technologies.  For the past decade, it has funded impressive research in the field, the results of which typically can transfer to other disciplines and questions related to space, time and events.  Note, too, that both the pre-workshops and the conference are FREE.

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National Institute of Justice Registration is now open for the rescheduled 11th Crime Mapping Research Conference!

The 11th Crime Mapping Research Conference

When: October 19–21, 2011 Pre-conference Workshops: October 17–18

Where: Hilton Miami Downtown Miami, FL

Register: http://www.crimemapping2011.com/

About: The Crime Mapping Research Conference is about understanding crime, criminal justice, and public safety and their effect on, and by, places. At the 11th conference, you can explore: the latest research findings practical applications technology demonstrations policy results

Stay Connected with NCJRS! Register Now!

Free registration with NCJRS keeps you informed about new publications, grant and funding opportunities, and other news and announcements.

To register, visit: http://www.ncjrs.gov/subreg.html

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From Rumsey's site: http://networkedblogs.com/fBgu5

1,634  new maps and images have been added to the David Rumsey Map Collection, bringing the online collection to over 26,000 maps and images. Included in this addition are five issues of Colton's General Atlas of the World dated from 1865 to 1886. Also two editions of Schonberg's Standard Atlas of the World, 1865 and 1867. Sheets from two national surveys: six composite images of the entire Wheeler Survey of the U.S. West, 1876, and the first 338 sheets of the massive 19th century survey of Germany, Karte des Deutschen Reiches, 1893 (the remaining 336 sheets will follow in the next update). Added are elegant maps from the Atlante Geographico de Agostini, 1952, and a complete set of all the Shell Oil Company Automobile Road maps of North America, 1956. All titles may be found by clicking on the View links or images below. Or click here to view all 1,634 new maps and images.

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This is a great weekend to be in Raleigh, North Carolina. Forget about the BBQ. Instead, head to the annual NICAR (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) confab at the Raleigh Marriott City Center. Or if it's too far or too late to go, then go to Twitter and do a search for the hashtag #NICAR11. Many, many attendees are doing a great job of tracking multiple presentations and hands-on workshops and then posting wonderful links to PowerPoint slides, Tipsheets (often being shared via Google Docs) and the debate about which is really the best style BBQ.

The reason we are calling this a "watershed" is that I have attended these for nearly 15+ years, and I've never seen such a wonderful compote of traditional journalists PLUS digital-savvy folks coming in from non-journalism backgrounds. This is the only way journalism -- aggressive, watchdog journalism -- can be saved.

Thanks to all for your investments in time, money and generous sharing.

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Marcus Zillman's research efforts bring to the surface a ton of tools that journalists can use, and especially so this month.  Check out the first 8 pages in his PDF on "Web Data Extractors" at http://awarenesswatch.virtualprivatelibrary.net/V9N2.pdf 

Marcus Zillman writes:

Check out Google-Refine at http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

google-refine Google Refine, a power tool for working with messy data (formerly Freebase Gridworks)

Project Home		Downloads		Wiki		Issues		Source

Summary | Updates | People

From Flowingdata.com .....

Find the names in your data with Mr. People

Inspired by Shan Carter's simple data converter, appropriately named Mr. Data Converter, Matthew Ericson just put Mr. People online. The tool lets you paste a list of names, and it will parse the first and last name, suffix, title, and other parts for you. You can even have multiple names in a single row.

Years ago, while trying to clean up the names of donors in campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, I hacked together a Perl module — loosely based on the Lingua-EN-NameParse module — to standardize names. One port to Ruby later, I've finally put together a Web front end for it.

Getting data in the right format, whether for analysis or visualization, can be a huge pain. Imagine. All the data you need is right in front of you, but you can't do anything with it yet, because as often is the case, it's not in a nice and pretty rectangular format. So anything that makes this easier and quicker is an instant bookmark for me.

[Mr. People via @mericson]

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The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk ) has been around for 13 years, and it has become increasingly important for analytic journalists who believe that simulation modeling is -- and increasingly will be -- an keystone perspective for serious, value-added journalism.  And it's one of the FREE e-journals available.  Support it if you can. 

In the meantime, if you're not familiar with agent-based modeling, check out this article by Lynne Hamill; it will point you to some useful concepts and tools:

Agent-Based Modelling: The Next 15 Years
by Lynne Hamill
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/7.html  
Abstract
This short note makes recommendations for the future direction of research in agent-based modelling (ABM). It is a personal view based on my experience as a policy adviser who has recently come to ABM. I suggest that to promote the use of ABM, the ABM community needs demonstrate the value of modelling to other social scientists by showing-by-doing and offering training projects; and to produce tools, guidance on good-practice and basic building blocks. Then the policy contexts most likely to benefit from ABM need to be identified along with any new data requirements, so that the usefulness of ABM can be demonstrated to policy analysts. This is, in my view, the challenge facing the ABM community for the next 15 years.

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Census tract data and maps, while better than nothing, can often deceive because the size of the tract is greatly influenced by population size, not area. It is not uncommon that natural and constructed barriers -- mountains or freeways -- influence the movements and spatial demographics of a tract. Ah, but BLOCK data, now there is some fine, fine-grained data that we can use to extract insights and meaning. Once again, Flowingdata.com tips us off to a good visualization of population data and the resulting maps.

See also:

1. Social life of Foursquare users mapped
2. Stamen makes experimental prettymaps
3. Mapping Manhattan’s Skyscraper Districts Through Time

From FlowingData....

Statistical literacy guides for the basics

"You can get pretty far with data graphics with just limited statistical knowledge, but if you want to take your skills, resume, and portfolio to the next level, you should learn standard data practices. Of all places, UK Parliament has some short and free guides to help you with basic statistical concepts. They provide 13 notes, each only two or three pages long that can help you with stuff like how to adjust for inflation, confidence intervals and statistical significance, or basic graph suggestions [pdf]. I like."

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