Github-101-Class-NICAR-2018

Materials for Github 101 for journalists taught at IRE/NICAR conference in March 2018

Some newsrooms that share their methodologies:

• 538
• ProPublica
• USA Today
• BuzzFeed News

What this class will cover:

• What is GitHub? Why is it useful for journalists?

  1. Learn from/build upon other people’s work! Use other reporters’ analyses and download data for your own stories.

     Examples:

     • BuzzFeed News' 'Trump World', a list of more than 1,500 people and organizations connected to the administration.
     • ProPublica's Facebook Political Ad Collector

  2. Share your own work with the world!

  3. Track changes — helpful for the same reasons you might want to go back to an earlier draft in a story. But also helpful if you want to track changes to a dataset you regularly update to see what’s new.

Hands on exercises

1. Make your own project (‘repo’).

• Add some text to the readme

  A readme is the landing page of your repo, where you explain what’s in the repo and any caveats people should be aware of before diving into your data and analysis.

• ‘Commit’ changes

• Make a branch

• Make a pull request, check out the differences and if everything looks good, merge with master.

Now turn to your neighbor and make a branch on their repo. Suggest changes or add language to their readme. And make a pull request.

2. Checking out differences in new data

The SAM_Exclusions_Public_Extract_2017-01-17.CSV.zip file contains data about entities that were prohibited from receiving federal contracts as of January 1, 2017.

To make things easier for this class, we've pulled out a slice of that data to work with:

1. FEMA.csv contains all individuals and firms the Federal Emergency Managment Agency (FEMA) added to this list.
2. FEMA_SAMnum.csv contains the unique identifier for each of those entities

If you want to dig into this further, the most recent data can be downloaded here.

We're going to make a new branch to add data from March 3, 2018. You can download that data here.

Resources:

• This guide from Github is a good introduction to the ideas and terms you'll need to know.

• An example of how to show your work to the world if you use SQL (also a good resource if you're trying to learn SQL).

• Here's a guide to using Markdown.