DIY data gathering: Tools to help you get and use the data you want

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.

Presenters:

Noah Veltman is a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the BBC. He's done a lot of neat data projects including a map of the history of street names in San Francisco, which involved gasp calling actual human beings to gather all his data. 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 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 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 Labto compile photographs of the area.