This is a work-in-progress, so please let me know what I’ve missed. If you have a bunch of links to add, let me know and I’ll give you a link to edit.

Online Investigative journalism: more on reporting through analytics: what we did, including the search terms that led us to identify a homicide victim.

Why Reporting from Analytics Works:

Reporting from analytics works because it brings crime reporting back to its investigative roots. It’s shoe leather reporting, happening online. But it works because it’s even more than that.

As the scope of crime reporting has diminished, so too, has the scope of voices included in the reporting. Which is why it’s worth remembering that reporting from analytics is really nothing more than listening to how people are talking about the beat. When I look at my analytics I learn the words people are using to discuss homicides. I learn what information they have, and what information they’re looking for. I learn what the gaps are between what I know, what the police know, and what my audience knows.

Connected China is a database of political power in China. It illustrates the social and institutional ties between the country’s leaders with a focus on explaining how and why the current crop of leaders came to power.

Partisanship in the Senate.

Partisanship in the House.

Also, I was curious if Supreme Court justices are being appointed younger or serving longer than in the past, so I visualized that, too.

All of this was made with D3.

In a 6-1 per curiam opinion, the court held that Opperman met the requirements of the Ohio Public Records Act by offering to provide Gambill with a copy of the county’s electronic database containing deed information and aerial photos of all property in the county if Gambill paid the estimated $2,000 cost of separating that data from proprietary mapmaking software protected by U.S. patent laws that is “inextricably intertwined” with the data on the engineer’s computer.

Among the court’s sources for the ruling is an affidavit from the county engineer, Craig Opperman:

64. Without the ESRI software program the data cannot be compiled in a readable format as it is provided at the Scioto County Engineer’s Office.

65. The Scioto County Engineer’s Office can not separate the data from the ESRI software program files.

Reading through the ruling, it appears the court thought (possibly with the engineer’s encouragement) there was no way to view the data except in ArcView or ArcGIS publisher.

That would seem, on its face, false, as ArcGIS publisher says on its site:

Had the engineer exported a Shapefile, it could have been viewed using free software without violating ESRI’s copyright.

The court ruled six-to-one in favor of the county. The one dissenting judge, Paul E. Pfeifer, saw the legal implications of this ruling:

The county engineer in this case has intertwined public records with proprietary software and expects citizens seeking public records to pay an exorbitant price to untie the knot. A person seeking public records should expect to pay the price for copying the records, but not the price for a public entity’s mistake in purchasing inefficient software. Will every citizen asking for what relator, Robert Gambill, seeks—access to records that the majority acknowledges are public records—also have to pay $2,000? The holding in this case encourages public entities desiring secrecy to hide public records within a software lockbox and require individual citizens to provide the golden key to unlock it.

Many thanks to members of the NICAR-L listserv for sharing their experience with ESRI products and pointing me to the original ruling.

And yet, it looks like I spend most of my time either in email or Google Docs.

Most of my news, as I expected, gets consumed via RSS.