First day of class, intro to the course.

1. INTRODUCTION
DATABASE JOURNALISM

2. TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF
• What’s your name?
• Where are you from?
• Why are you taking this course?
• What’s your favorite spot on the internet?

3. WHAT’S A DATABASE?
• Software that runs on a server
• Stores structured information
• Usually not directly accessible by other computers
on the internet

4. WHY DATABASES?
• Almost every site you visit collects information about
you and stores it in a database
• You live in the information age.
• Would you rather be manipulate data or get manipulated
by data?

5. TAKE FACEBOOK
• Your hard drive is probably about 500 gigabytes.
Facebook collects 512,000 of those full of data
everyday.
• 2.5 billion shares (status updates, wall posts, photos, videos,
comments)
• 2.7 billion likes
• 300 million photos
• 70,000 queries executed

6. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS COURSE
• Analyze data through code
• Social networks, news articles, photos, wikileaks data
dumps, bills in congress, etc.
• Present that data via web interfaces
• Make something useful out of something that you just can’t
comprehend otherwise

7. SOME EXAMPLES

8. ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?
• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Anything else

9. HOW THE WEB WORKS
PC
Google PC
Internet
Service
Provider
Internet
Your
Service
PC
Provider
Server
PC YouTube
PC

10. HOW THE WEB WORKS
PC
Google PC
Internet
Service
Provider
Internet
Your
Service
PC
Provider
Server
PC YouTube
PC

11. COURSEWORK
• Relational Database Design
• Models
• API Mashups
• Data mining/scraping tool
• Final Project
• Polished Mashup or Data Scraping/Mining Tool

12. GRADING
• Each assignment is worth a specified number of
points
• Thoughtfulness
• Does the assignment provoke deeper thinking?
• Ease of Use
• How easy is it for me to use your application?
• Beauty
• Does the visual design add to and complement the overall
product?
• Effort
• Did you give it everything you had?

13. SPEAKING OF EFFORT
• Coding can be hard. It requires a lot of practice.
• When assignments are due, you should submit them
online through the class website even if they don’t
work properly.
• If you turn the assignment in on time, you can keep
iterating on it without penalties for turning it in late.

14. AND DON’T STEAL CODE
• There are a lot of examples on the web
• It’s perfectly fine to use and learn from them
• It’s another thing entirely to not give credit to that
person
• If you fail to attribute code borrowed from
somewhere else, I will fail you with prejudice

15. LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT MAMP

16. THE COURSE WEBSITE
• http://courses.dataplayed.com/um/cvj531
• http://courses.dataplayed.com/um/cvj531/register
• The registration code is swartz

17. HTML RECAP