Mid-winter break
The half-time whistle
This month the team are recuperating and regrouping in order to build an awesome second half of the year - unfortunately that means no meet-up for June 😥
But we've been thinking: what has been your favourite meet-up of the year so far? And have you got any ideas about the sorts of things you want to see or hear at Hacks/Hackers Brisbane?
Let us know! We want to develop a program for the rest of the year that excites you, encourages you, inspires you, or just sounds like a fun Wednesday night.
You can email us, tweet us @HacksHackersBNE or join our Slack group Stories With Data.
ICYMI
1Passowrd is an essential part of digital hygiene and they have an amazing offer for journalists. You should grab this one with both hands, especially if you don't already use a password manager
The New York Times has opened a bunch of its internal data journalism training materials to the public. Which is really ace
This visualisation from The Pudding of the most commonly used names in songs is really simple design-wise but in-depth and super interesting if music deep-dives are your thing
The Washington Post's tech columnist says Chrome "looks a lot like surveillance software"
Modern pop culture is podcasts about TV and TV about podcasts. If you liked the Chernobyl mini-series, there's a behind-the-scenes podcast
About last month...
Thanks to those who came along to May's Election Reflection meet-up. It was a small group and it was more of a chat than a presentation, so here are the things we mulled over:
"Party Peeper" - a project that unfortunately didn't get off the ground at the ABC. Web developer Colin Gourlay gave a demo of his concept - being able to point your phone camera at a ballot paper and with the help of optical character recognition, display info about the political parties on the ballot
The Guardian's database of political advertising on Facebook
How useful are maps to revealing the narrative of an election? Or do we just like maps that are interactive? They're hard to do and everyone seems to use them differently
The folks at Google put together some graphs and visualisations based on their election search data. Apparently there was very little interest in a "retiree tax"