NICAR 2026
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NICAR 2026 |
Recapping my weekend at Investigative Reporters and Editors’ NICAR conference:
A long weekend of all things data journalism.
My obligatory NICAR newbie picture
I flew from Atlanta to Indianapolis in early March for my first NICAR. I figured I’d use some of my sharpened and new skills to share some highlights.
It took just over an hour to fly roughly 430 miles from Atlanta to Indianapolis.
The details: I used R to create this Leaflet map, then uploaded the HTML widget to Github so I could host it on a URL that I could embed it with iframe HTML code.
I was very impressed by the conference’s speaker lineup. From local reporters and editors to tech developers, they brought a wealth of knowledge about working with data.
The details: I used an automated web scraper to pull all the speakers and their listed information from the NICAR speakers page. Then I leaned on Copilot to help me aggregate the HQ city of each organization the speakers represented. I merged that list of locations and organizations with the speakers data frame in R, then reworked the table to count how many organizations were based in each city. I exported a simple list with that information and pasted it into Datawrapper, where I could easily use its map capabilities to start visualizing.
In Datawrapper, I customized the map with HTML tooltips, which is how you’re able to hover over locations and see how many organizations were based in a city.
A peek at my NICAR schedule
The details: I used an automated web scraper to pull the full NICAR 2026 schedule from IRE’s website. I made some tweaks to the spreadsheet the scraper created and formatted it to optimize the information for table creation in Datawrapper. To customize my Datawrapper table’s appearance, I used the program’s features and some simple HTML.
The details: I created a quick pivot table in Excel to count up the sessions I attended by track, then pasted that into Datawrapper to visualize the data.