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Document History TimelineJS can pull in media from different sources. It has built in support for: Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more media types in the future. Creating one is as easy as filling in a Google spreadsheet or as detailed as JSON. Tips and tricks to best utilize TimelineJS. Keep it short, and write each event as a part of a larger narrative. Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline. Include events that build up to major occurrences. Not just the major events. Sign up for Updates Get updates, tips and news by email. No Spam. Subscribe var fnames = new Array();var ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';fnames[1]='NAME';ftypes[1]='text'; try { var jqueryLoaded=jQuery; jqueryLoaded=true; } catch(err) { var jqueryLoaded=false; } var head= document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]; if (!jqueryLoaded) { var script = document.createElement('script'); script.type = 'text/javascript'; script.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js'; head.appendChild(script); if (script.readyState && script.onload!==null){ script.onreadystatechange= function () { if (this.readyState == 'complete') mce_preload_check(); } } } var script = document.createElement('script'); script.type = 'text/javascript'; script.src = 'http://downloads.mailchimp.com/js/jquery.form-n-validate.js'; head.appendChild(script); var err_style = ''; try{ err_style = mc_custom_error_style; } catch(e){ err_style = '#mc_embed_signup input.mce_inline_error{border-color:#6B0505;} #mc_embed_signup div.mce_inline_error{margin: 0 0 1em 0; padding: 5px 10px; background-color:#6B0505; font-weight: bold; z-index: 1; color:#fff;}'; } var head= document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]; var style= document.createElement('style'); style.type= 'text/css'; if (style.styleSheet) { style.styleSheet.cssText = err_style; } else { style.appendChild(document.createTextNode(err_style)); } head.appendChild(style); setTimeout('mce_preload_check();', 250); var mce_preload_checks = 0; function mce_preload_check(){ if (mce_preload_checks>40) return; mce_preload_checks++; try { var jqueryLoaded=jQuery; } catch(err) { setTimeout('mce_preload_check();', 250); return; } try { var validatorLoaded=jQuery("#fake-form").validate({}); } catch(err) { setTimeout('mce_preload_check();', 250); return; } mce_init_form(); } function mce_init_form(){ jQuery(document).ready( function($) { var options = { errorClass: 'mce_inline_error', errorElement: 'div', onkeyup: function(){}, onfocusout:function(){}, onblur:function(){} }; var mce_validator = $("#mc-embedded-subscribe-form").validate(options); $("#mc-embedded-subscribe-form").unbind('submit');//remove the validator so we can get into beforeSubmit on the ajaxform, which then calls the validator options = { url: 'http://verite.us4.list-manage2.com/subscribe/post-json?u=7cc197123f5f6d3b8dc4e176f&id=d7f2b5d664&c=?', type: 'GET', dataType: 'json', contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", beforeSubmit: function(){ $('#mce_tmp_error_msg').remove(); $('.datefield','#mc_embed_signup').each( function(){ var txt = 'filled'; var fields = new Array(); var i = 0; $(':text', this).each( function(){ fields[i] = this; i++; }); $(':hidden', this).each( function(){ var bday = false; if (fields.length == 2){ bday = true; fields[2] = {'value':1970};//trick birthdays into having years } if ( fields[0].value=='MM' && fields[1].value=='DD' && (fields[2].value=='YYYY' || (bday && fields[2].value==1970) ) ){ this.value = ''; } else if ( fields[0].value=='' && fields[1].value=='' && (fields[2].value=='' || (bday && fields[2].value==1970) ) ){ this.value = ''; } else { if (/\[day\]/.test(fields[0].name)){ this.value = fields[1].value+'/'+fields[0].value+'/'+fields[2].value; } else { this.value = fields[0].value+'/'+fields[1].value+'/'+fields[2].value; } } }); }); return mce_validator.form(); }, success: mce_success_cb }; $('#mc-embedded-subscribe-form').ajaxForm(options); }); } function mce_success_cb(resp){ $('#mce-success-response').hide(); $('#mce-error-response').hide(); if (resp.result=="success"){ $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').show(); $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').html(resp.msg); $('#mc-embedded-subscribe-form').each(function(){ this.reset(); }); } else { var index = -1; var msg; try { var parts = resp.msg.split(' - ',2); if (parts[1]==undefined){ msg = resp.msg; } else { i = parseInt(parts[0]); if (i.toString() == parts[0]){ index = parts[0]; msg = parts[1]; } else { index = -1; msg = resp.msg; } } } catch(e){ index = -1; msg = resp.msg; } try{ if (index== -1){ $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').show(); $('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').html(msg); } else { err_id = 'mce_tmp_error_msg'; html = ' '+msg+''; var input_id = '#mc_embed_signup'; var f = $(input_id); if (ftypes[index]=='address'){

INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web To

INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web Tools

Narrative + investigative: tips from IRE 2012, Part 1 At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, after a Phoenix reporter died in a car bomb while covering the mob, is usually considered an investigative-only playground, but narrative writers can learn a lot from these journalists’ techniques and resources. When might a narrative writer need investigative skills? A few possible scenarios: • When developing a character’s timeline and activities beyond the basic backgrounding • When navigating precarious relationships with sources • When organizing large and potentially complicated amounts of material • When gathering data and documents that might provide storytelling context – geopolitical, financial, etc. We asked This Land correspondent Kiera Feldman to cover the conference with an eye for material that might be particularly useful in narrative. She netted a range of ideas, tips and resources. Today, in Part 1, she covers areas including documents and data, online research and source relationships. Check back tomorrow for Part 2, “Writing the Investigative Story,” with best practices from Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times and Steve Fainaru of ESPN.

Public sector needs to improve quality of information, warns Eurim Parliamentary group gives cautious welcome to the EU's plans to open up more public sector data reddit this omnitracker.omniTrackEVarEvent( 12, 16, 'Guardian Government Computing: Reddit', 'click', '.reddit a' ); Comments (0) Sade Laja Guardian Professional, Monday 19 December 2011 07.08 EST Article history Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.

Shorenstein Center paper argues for collaboration in investigative reporting Thursday, June 2, 2011 Sandy Rowe, former editor of The Oregonian, and Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center fall 2010 and spring 2011. Photograph by Martha Stewart Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School Contact: Janell Simsjanell_sims@harvard.eduhttp://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/index.html Media organizations may be able to perform their watchdog roles more effectively working together than apart. That is one conclusion in a new paper, “Partners of Necessity: The Case for Collaboration in Local Investigative Reporting,” authored by Sandy Rowe, former editor of Portland’s The Oregonian. The paper is based on interviews and research that Rowe conducted while serving as a Knight Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Rowe’s research examines the theory underpinning collaborative work and shows emerging models of collaboration that can lead to more robust investigative and accountability reporting in local and regional markets. “Growing evidence suggests that collaborations and partnerships between new and established news organizations, universities and foundations may be the overlooked key for investigative journalism to thrive at the local and state levels,” Rowe writes. “These partnerships, variously and often loosely organized, can share responsibility for content creation, generate wider distribution of stories and spread the substantial cost of accountability journalism.” Rowe was editor of The Oregonian from 1993 until January 2010. Under her leadership, the newspaper won five Pulitzer Prizes including the Gold Medal for Public Service. Rowe chairs the Board of Visitors of The Knight Fellowships at Stanford University and is a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists. From 1984 until April 1993, Rowe was executive editor and vice president of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Virginian-Pilot won the Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting under her leadership. Rowe’s year-long fellowship at the Shorenstein Center was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read the full paper on the Shorenstein Center’s website.

How to use APIs from Twitter, Google & Facebook to find data, ideas by Katharine Jarmul Published Aug. 8, 2011 1:27 pm Updated Aug. 9, 2011 12:02 am As more and more journalists are finding, APIs are a great way to get data for your Web applications and projects. An API, or application programming interface, enables software programs to communicate with one another. (Chrys Wu wrote a helpful intro here.) To give you a better understanding of how they can help you, I’ve outlined some of the best APIs for finding content and explained how you can use open-source programming tools to glean information from them.

Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it? Simon Rogers: Our 10 point guide to data journalism and how it's changing Share  reddit this omnitracker.omniTrackEVarEvent( 12, 16, 'News: Reddit', 'click', '.reddit a' ); Comments (2) Data journalism. What is it and how is it changing? Photograph: Alamy Here's an interesting thing: data journalism is becoming part of the establishment. Not in an Oxbridge elite kind of way (although here's some data on that) but in the way it is becoming the industry standard.Two years ago, when we launched the Datablog, all this was new. People still asked if getting stories from data was really journalism and not everyone had seen Adrian Holovaty's riposte. But once you've had MPs expenses and Wikileaks, the startling thing is that no-one asks those questions anymore. Instead, they want to know, "how do we do it?"

Blog Learning to love…grep (let the computer search text for you) Posted by Michelle Minkoff on Aug 9, 2012 in Blog, Uncategorized | No Comments I’ve gotten into the habit of posting daily learnings on Twitter, but some things require a more in-depth reminder. I also haven’t done as much paying as forward as I’d like (but I’m having a TON of fun!  and dealing with health problems!  but mostly fun!) I’d like to try to start posting more helpful tips here, partially as a notebook for myself, and partially to help others with similar issues. Today’s problem: I needed to search for a few lines of text, which could be contained in any one of nine files with 100,000 lines each. Opening all of the files took a very long time on my computer, not to mention executing a search. Enter the “grep” command in Terminal, that allows you to quickly search files using the power of the computer.

New: World Health Organization (WHO) Releases Database on Nutrition, Obesity and Physical Activity (NOPA) Posted on June 5, 2011 by Gary D. Price From a WHO Announcement: The NOPA database has been created in close collaboration with health ministries and with support from the European Commission. It includes details on more than 300 national and sub-national policies that address nutrition, physical activity or obesity. Most of these policy documents have been developed in the past six years and refer to lifestyle trends such as the increasing consumption of industrially produced foods high in fat and sugar and declining physical activity. Physical inactivity and poor nutrition are considered to be risk factors to many non-communicable diseases, such as heart diseases and stroke, diabetes, cancer, and mental health disorders. The measurable indicators for policy development have been identified and monitored at the national level in accordance with the commitments made through the European Charter on Counteracting Obesity and the WHO European Action Plan for Food and Nutrition Policy 2007–2012. As an example of these commitments, the Nutrition, Obesity and Physical Activity Database shows that 28 Member States have stated that they plan to take action on physical activity in the school setting, 11 plan to address the adequate labeling of food products and 9 plan to deal with appropriate food marketing practices. Direct to NOPA Database

TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight’s fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I’d like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I’m sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O’Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I’d like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states.

TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight’s fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I’d like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I’m sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O’Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I’d like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states.

The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats Using Benford's law, forensic statisticians can spot suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and estimate the chances figures have been tampered with

The results were fun. Greece – whose economy has tanked – showed the largest and most suspicious deviation from Benford's law of any country in the euro.