"Official" BARUG March 2013 Meeting

Our March meetup will be devoted to R and data-driven journalism.

Speakers will include: Shane Shifflett, Coulter Jones, Kendall Taggart and others from the Center for Investigative Reporting. (http://cironline.org/)

This meeting will be co-sponsored by RStudio

Agenda:
6:30 PM Networking and Pizza
7:00 announcements
7:05 Lightning talk: Andrew Elliott*: Using RStudio's Shiny to Publish R to the Web (http://glimmer.rstudio.com/awegro/RunningChase/)
7:20 PM Journalism talks begin

Better Data Science for Newsrooms
Data-driven journalism is nothing new. For decades reporters have used statistics and other social science methods to find racial discrimination in home lending (http://powerreporting.com/color/), show how inspection failures made a hurricane's destruction worse (http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1993) and done countless campaign contribution stories (http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/buyingpres.html). The growth of open-source technology, readily available data and newer methods, has increased the frenzy for data-driven journalism, but many of the techniques haven't changed. What should public-minded journalists be doing to improve investigative techniques? How can a more systematic data analysis improve findings? With one of the largest news technology teams in the country, the Center for Investigative Reporting is trying to answer those questions and explore new ways to analyze data and engage the public. Learn about the work CIR is doing, it's open-source (http://armstrongcms.org/) projects (http://cironline.org/blog/post/using-machine-learning-extract-quotes-text-3687) and how data driven journalism can be improved. CIR will be sharing details on several projects currently in the works and explain how you can help.

Check out CIR Github pages:

https://github.com/organizations/cirlabs https://github.com/baycitizen

• Andrew Elliott is an Analytics Manager at Shutterfly where he uses R to perform data analysis to gauge business performance. His favorite packages include RODBC, Plyr, doSNOW and ggplot2. He's also a huge fan of Stackoverflow.