# Resources for using data

## Using & analyzing data

[Common abbreviations in criminal legal system records](http://amerusa.net/resource_documents/CriminalRecordAbbreviations.pdf)

[QA process for data analysis](https://source.opennews.org/articles/qa-process-confidence-data-stories/)

[CPE's guide on analyzing traffic stop data](https://policingequity.org/data-collection-insights/33-cpe-toolkit-stop-data-collection-guidebook/file)

[RATH](https://rath.kanaries.net/) by Kanaries for no-code exploratory data analysis

[Splunk](https://www.splunk.com/) is an intelligence analysis tool to make sense of vast amounts of data.

## Collecting data

[Compendium of state open records laws](https://www.rcfp.org/open-government-guide/)

[ScrapingBee for headless websites](https://www.scrapingbee.com/)

[Best practices for data collection](https://inspectelement.org/best-practices-data-collection.html) from Inspect Element

[Finding undocumented APIs](https://inspectelement.org/apis.html) from Inspect Element

[Automatic DocumentCloud scraping](https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2022/may/24/release-notes-keep-an-eye-on-your-favorite-agencie/) which requires a verified MuckRock account. If you don't have one, you can use ours! Reach out.

[The Berkeley COPWATCH "People's Database" guide](https://www.berkeleycopwatch.org/people-s-database) for creating a community accountability tool

## Processing data

[Crosswalker](https://github.com/washingtonpost/crosswalker) is for joining columns of text data that don’t match perfectly.

[CJWorkbench](https://github.com/CJWorkbench/cjworkbench), a spreadsheet-like program with powerful tools for data journalism.

[PDF processing and OCR](https://github.com/chadday/nicar_ocr) from Chad Day for NICAR

[Useful file types: Parquet, SQLite, FlatGeobuf](https://observablehq.com/@asg017/nicar23-lightning-talk-tipsheet-3-file-formats) from Alex Garcia

[Frictionless data](https://frictionlessdata.io/) for transforming and describing messy datasets, making them more interoperable, and creating a pipeline

[Kyle Walker's guide](https://walker-data.com/umich-workshop-2023/python/#1) for using Python to do spatial mapping and analysis

## Learning Python

[Consuming APIs with Python](https://realpython.com/python-api/#consuming-apis-with-python-practical-examples) from Realpython

[An intro to your first notebook using Python & Jupyter](https://github.com/palewire/first-python-notebook) from Palewire

[A mini Python and Jupyter bootcamp](https://github.com/ireapps/pycar) from NICAR

[Python scraping](https://github.com/oxylabs/web-scraping-tutorials/tree/main/python) from Oxylabs