DIY data gathering: Tools to help you get and use the data you want
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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.
Noah Veltman is a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the BBC. He's done a lot of neat data projects (http://noahveltman.com/sandbox/) including a map of the history of street names in San Francisco, which involved gasp calling actual human beings to gather all his data (http://source.mozillaopennews.org/articles/mapping-history-street-names/). 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 (http://tabula.nerdpower.org/) 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 (https://www.meetup.com/Hacks-Hackers-Philadelphia/events/111090052/) 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 Lab (http://mapknitter.org/) to compile photographs of the area.