Research notes

The World Cup is here. For a large swath of the planet, we do not have a team in the tournament, which raises a question: Who do you root for game by game? I’m teaching a sports data visualiza...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/174831187619

In October 1997, I was trying to graduate from college. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications told me that I needed 19 credit hours to graduate mid ...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/141582141069

FAA seeking drone rules favorable to commercial operators : Big news coming tomorrow.

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/111032272389

How Journalism Professors Used Legos to Teach Super Bowl Data Visualization - American Journalism Review : > Concerned that he wasn’t spending enough time on the “mental > tools�...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/109908284869

Today in my data visualization class, I made students visualize meaningful differences between this year’s Super Bowl teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Except I made the...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/108885953514

Everything I Know About Data I Learned From 70s Album Rock Radio, my Newsgeist 2014 Ignite talk.

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/104780025474

This semester, I’m teaching a class in Story Bots, which is really a programming class disguised as a journalism class. I’m teaching students enough programming that they can automate journal...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/103144761014

True Facts, Maybe - Learning - Source: An OpenNews project : My latest on Mozilla Source Learning, mixing epistemology, Plato’s Cave, satellite imagery and animated gifs.

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/92083846174

Nostalgia and Newspapers : > If you want to cry in your beer about the good old days, go ahead. > Just stay the hell away from the kids while you’re reminiscing; > ...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/89161700619

Legacy Media: The Missing Gene : > As I witnessed the rise of the digital sector – its obsession with > fast growth, and its inevitable collision course with legacy med...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/89067698389

If you’re a UNL CoJMC student looking for courses in the fall, here’s two I’m teaching you should take a look at: JOUR407: INVESTIGATIVE AND COMPUTER-ASSISTED REPORTING: This class is al...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/81303721717

First time at NICAR this year? Awesome. Welcome. This was my 15th conference. I started in 1997 in Nashville. I was a senior in college, desperate to find a job, and NICAR was an amazing and form...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/78333096044

One of the arguments used to push back against adding new things into journalism school curricula is “Our curriculum is too full! We can’t possibly add anything more! What are we going to do?...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/76286367508

How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math : > You might think the principal coder behind PolitiFact took naturally > to math. You’d be wrong. I appear to have struck...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/66933063263

I WANT TO SOLVE A JOURNALISM PROBLEM WITH A MAKERBOT . WHAT IS IT? I hate having a fantastic solution and no problem to solve. Being a solution in search of a problem sucks. I’m hoping to get...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/61028413999

In any software development project, you have a line in the sand called the Minimum Viable Product. It’s the point where you’ve got it working well enough and with enough features that the th...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/60195170864

How to use Chartbuilder to make simple graphics fast | Poynter. : This post I wrote about spinning up your own version of Chartbuilder should be called “I remember working in a Windows only n...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/58426057425

Storify recap: Should all journalism students be programmers? | IJNet : I took part in a mega-panel at AEJMC provocatively titled Why Your Students Must Be Programmers. My take on it? I don�...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/58425953423

Noah Veltman: Code, the newsroom, and self-doubt : veltman : > I can pinpoint the exact moment when the awesome craziness of my > OpenNews fellowship  > sank in. I was on�...

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/56160075204

How to visually explore local politics with network graphs : Wrote this for Poynter mostly as an excuse to use NodeXL, which is pretty easy and pretty powerful.

https://blog.mattwaite.com/post/55806042211