10 NICAR lightning talks to guide you through cats, statistical resampling, fear of math, and more

This year’s NICAR conference was in sunny Denver, and as promised, the sessions offered a little (or a lot) for everyone, from journalists looking for guidance on a stalled FOIA processes to those in search of advanced Python training to those who need advice on refining their interactives for mobile.

To break up the intensity of the sessions, NICAR also puts on the delightful lightning talks: five-minute presentations from attendees on topics of their choice, voted on by the NICAR community. The ten talks this year ran the gamut, and despite their length, were packed with useful tips and practical tools (cats featured prominently), as well as ideas for broadening how we think about data-driven journalism. Below are the talks from this year.

Gregor Aisch of The New York Times on the future of ‘interactive news’

Jonathan Stray of the Overview project and Columbia on one trick that will solve every statistics problem

Christopher Groskopf of Quartz on using lookup to save journalists from repetitive work such as mapping postal codes to state names

Ariana Giorgi of the Chronicle of Higher Education with a quick-hits guide for newsrooms considering integrating automation

Ken Schwencke of The Thrust on using vector tiles for your maps

Dan Nguyen of Stanford on regular expressions and exploring data

Nicole Zhu of Northwestern University’s Knight Lab on how to push yourself to read 52 books in 52 weeks

Adam Playford of the Tampa Bay Times on what his team learned from its Failure Factories investigation

Jennifer LaFleur of the Center for Investigative Reporting on using cats to explain statistical concepts

Ryann Grochowski Jones of ProPublica on how to overcome your fear of math