Stabile Seminar

The empirical spine of investigative reporting

Syllabus    Weekly schedule   Handouts / Resources

Before class

Reading

Due Monday, March 10 (enjoy the nice weekend!) Get as far as you can on analyzing the table of service calls in New York City for January and February 2014. Expect to have to use SELECT, GROUP BY, ORDER BY and WHERE clauses in your queries. Try to write a lede of a story about what New Yorkers were complaining about in Mayor DeBlasio's first two months in office. Be sure to send us a) your lede, and b) a document showing the SQL for the key queries you wrote. We don't need all of them, but there may be several that contribute to your lede. Turn something in, even if you can't get very far. Without it, we can't help you.

NOTE: I made a mistake on the original practice database, which only had one day, not two months' worth of complaints. Because of the size, I've created another download that you can import into your practice database the same way you did before, this time called janrequests.sql. It contains only two weeks' worth of complaints, from Mayor DeBlasio's first two full weeks in office. If you don't remember how to import, go back to the video and skip to the very end. It'll show you the screens.

In class

Resources

MySQL videos, practice data and tip sheets
Other tools for the week
Troy Thibodeaux's gentle introduction to SQL using SQLite
Other SQL tip sheets

Structured Query Language is such a standard way to look things up in databases that there are a gizillion tutorials already out in the wild. Being with W3Schools.com. There are slightly different flavors of SQL depending on which software you use, but in general they all have the same features.

There are good IRE tip sheets for Microsoft Access, but none of you have that available to you on your Macs. That said, the tip sheets give you a good overview of WHY you want to graduate from a spreadsheet, and the kinds of things a "relational" database can do that are not ideal in spreadsheets.