Stabile Seminar

The empirical spine of investigative reporting

Syllabus Weekly schedule Handouts / Resources

Before class

Reading

"Temporary Work, Lasting Harm" by Michael Grabell, Olga Pierce and Jeff Larson, ProPublica, 2013. Presented by Joanna Bernstein.
"An Empty Desk Epidemic" by David Jackson, Gary Marx and Alex Richards, Chicago Tribune, 2012. Presented by Melissa Hirsch.

Review videos (and the handouts in Resources)

Your background in Excel will determine how much of these tutorials you feel you need to review. You are expected to know how to filter data tables, create a pivot table with comparative percentages, do math on dates and times, and use formulas to split a name and look up a value. Each of these tutorials focuses on a different skill. Look at the resources below for compilations of tip sheets that will review the ideas for you.

Using Excel as a database: Filtering and pivot tables.
Advanced Excel skills: lookups and date math
Advanced Excel skills: ranking and grouping into categories

In class

Reading presentations
Demonstration of some things you'll know how to do by the end of the semester
Lab on story memo or Excel skills -- students' choice
Example data set: Iowa Republican primary results

Resources

Tip sheets for spreadsheets

Mary Jo Webster's "My Favorite (Excel) Things" handout, a classic.
Filtering and pivot tables in Excel. This is for Windows, so it will look a little different than on your screen, but the concepts are the same.

Extra exercises

You might want to go over a couple of exercises to get you used to the concepts. IRE's educator's resource center has some archived practice datasets and guides. They use an old version of Excel, so they'll look different than yours. But the ideas as ones that you'll want to understand. Use Piazza liberally to ask how to convert these guides to something more modern. The ones that will be best for this week for you are the school reports, the car phones (yes, they used to call cell phones "car phones" becuase they were too big to walk around with), and the pivot tables (excuse the use of the Redskins football team -- we'd probably use a different team today.)