Data journalism in St. Louis

Hundreds of journalists from around the world will convene at the St. Louis Union Station Marriott Feb. 23-26 to share strategies and discuss the latest trends in data journalism during Investigative Reporters & Editors’ annual Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference.

The conference, one of two hosted by IRE, focuses on techniques to cull facts and report stories using data collected by governments and businesses. More than 130 speakers from dozens of news organizations, universities and nonprofits will be presenting at the four-day conference. Topics range from best practices in data visualization to tracking social media to fundamentals of the programming language Python and how to use Excel in your reporting.

New to data journalism? There are dozens of hands-on classes that teach the basics of statistics, databases, data visualization and more. Check out the full schedule for all of the panels and hands-on classes being offered.

This year’s conference will also feature a 12-hour hack-a-thon presented by ScraperWiki where journalists and computer programmers will “liberate” a data set that has been difficult to access. The folks from ScraperWiki will be on hand to help and lead an opening session  on how to scrape using Scraperwiki.

Early registration has ended, but on-site registration will be available every day of the conference.  Stop by the Marriot to learn more about data journalism or IRE.