Every visualization scientist knows that while we enjoy creating the visualizations, the bulk of our time is spent in finding, processing, and formatting the data into some usable form. Over at ProPublica they have a nice comprehensive series on various tools, applications, and SDK’s for handling data in a wide variety of formats.
These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you’re already an experienced programmer, you might learn about a new library or tool you haven’t tried yet.
If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites — so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
via Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data – ProPublica.
