Idea Lab

Love PANDA? Try csvkit to Standardize Your Data

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that PANDA has been out in the world for a while, we would like to suggest you also take a look at a "cousin" project of sorts: csvkit. csvkit is a suite of powertools for working with Comma-separated values (CSV) files. It's a command line toolkit, so you will need some minimal technical know-how to get started, but it also has extensive documentation. Those new to such tools will find the tutorial particularly useful! The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. Both PANDA and csvkit have...

• September 17, 2012
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PANDA Development Wraps Up

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

September 6 will be both the PANDA Project's one-year anniversary, as well as my last day as a full-time developer. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. To celebrate the end of primary development, we've spent the last few weeks on spit-and-polish tasks. We released version 1.0.1 to address bugs found in 1.0.0, updated the documentation, and created a series of three quick, one-minute videos to persuade you why you should get a PANDA right now. The Videos Welcome to PANDA: Welcome to PANDA! from PANDA Project...

• August 28, 2012
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Stable at Last, PANDA Reaches 1.0!

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eleven months ago, we began prototyping PANDA. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. I hacked for a month on an experimental version, verified that our technology choices worked, and then threw it out and started over. Since that time, development has proceeded in steady, week-long iterations, checkpointed by numerous releases and two-day long PANDA team-planning sessions. We've implemented every feature from our "must have" list, a large chunk of our "want" list, and even one or two off our "not likely" list (in response to user...

• August 2, 2012
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Human-Assisted Reporting Made Easier With PANDA Search Notifications

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Wouldn't it be sweet if you just got an email when something newsworthy happens? Wouldn't that make your job easier? Well, have we got news for you. Today's release, PANDA beta 2, has an awesome new feature: search notifications. Think of it like a Google News search: Go to PANDA and search for something. Check the box that says you want emails, and your PANDA will send you an email when there are new results for your search! How does it work? Every night, PANDA looks at everybody's saved searches and checks for new results. New results may have arrived...

• June 8, 2012
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Your PANDA Is Here, and It Demands Data! (Beta 1 Launch Details)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're excited to, for the first time, put PANDA into users' hands! After roughly six months of development, we are releasing our first beta version. This release implements nearly all of our "must have" features. We've written several times (1, 2, 3) about specific parts of PANDA in development, but until now haven't paid much attention to the user interface of the application itself. With this release we feel we've reached a level of usability that will demonstrate exactly why you need a PANDA in your newsroom. Store your datasets ... and find them again One common problem with handling...

• February 16, 2012
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Feed Your PANDA With New APIs and Excel Import

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last time I wrote it was to solicit ideas for PANDA's API. We've since implemented those ideas, and we've just released our third alpha, which includes a complete writable API, demo scripts showing how to import from three different data sources, and the ability to import data from Excel spreadsheets. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. Try Alpha 3 now. Hello, Write API Our new write API is designed to be as simple and consistent as possible. We've gone to great lengths to illustrate how...

• January 5, 2012
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PANDA Project Releases Alpha 2 (and Needs Your API Ideas!)

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Friday, we closed out our eighth iteration of PANDA Project development and published our second alpha. We've added a login/registration system, dataset search, complex query support and a variety of other improvements. You can try out the new release now by visiting our test site here. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. We've incorporated much of the feedback we got in response to the first release, though some significant features, such as support for alternative file formats, have been intentionally put off while we focus...

• December 8, 2011
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PANDA Project Releases a First Alpha

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

In September, the complete PANDA team met at ONA in Boston to review our survey responses, organize them into features, and plot a development road map for the year. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. On our wiki, you can see transcribed versions of the documents we created during that planning session: Users, needs and use cases Features, prioritized Release schedule, with features The last link is particularly important, because it documents that today is an important day: Today is Alpha 1 release day! PANDA is...

• November 4, 2011
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PANDA Survey Shows Newsrooms Swimming in Data

by Christopher Groskopf
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The first PANDA task officially checked off our to-do list was the drafting of our Future Users Survey. We distributed a link to the survey via Twitter, the NICAR-L mailing list and email. The PANDA project aims to make basic data analysis quick and easy for news organizations, and make data sharing simple. The survey covers a range of topics that we felt were crucial to understanding our future users, including the technical aptitude of the staff in their newsrooms, the quantity of data they work with, and possible barriers to using the software. So far, we've had 77 responses...

• September 21, 2011
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