A Command-Line Murder Mystery

Solve a murder mystery using the command line!

Command line skills are really useful for data journalism, and Noah Veltman's Command Line Murders is possibly the most fun way to get started.

"The command line (also known as the command line interface, or CLI, or sometimes the terminal), is a plain text-based interface for executing commands on a computer. If you've ever seen a movie about hackers from the 1980s, like WarGames, where they stare at a prompt on a black screen and type in commands one at a time, it's basically that." (Veltman (https://github.com/journocoders/clmystery/blob/master/cheatsheet.md))

Cheat sheets will be provided so you can take part even if you've never used your computer's command line before.

You must bring a laptop. If your computer runs Linux or Mac OS, you already have everything you need - just open the Terminal application. Windows users, please download Cygwin (https://cygwin.com/install.html) before the event, so you can spend as much time as possible solving the mystery rather than installing software. Cygwin provides a similar command line environment to the one you'll find on Linux systems.

Why use the command line for data journalism?

Being comfortable with the command line means you can make use of various useful data tools that work on the command line, including csvkit (https://csvkit.readthedocs.io), which is fairly widely used now for lots of basic data tasks (converting from Excel to CSV, cleaning, filtering, sorting, etc). Because the terminal is text-based it is also easy to record your actions and replicate them in the future with little extra work.

Oh, and make sure to join the collaborative hackpad (https://journocoders.hackpad.com/) for the event!

Schedule
19.00: Doors open
19.30: Show & tell - if you've seen an interesting data-driven story or interactive you'd like to share, please add a link to the Hackpad
19.40: Command Line Murders
21.00: The pub!