In October 1997, I was trying to graduate from college. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications told me that I needed 19 credit hours to graduate mid year, and that’s how many I was taking.
That is, until they told me six weeks before graduation that I needed one more.
To get that credit hour, the Journalism Department chair agreed to let me complete an independent study. In that independent study, for one credit hour, I was to create a Computer-Assisted Reporting class. The proposal I had to write said I would create a syllabus, recommend texts and create class materials.
In the proposal, I wrote that “every reporter should know how to feed a city budget into a spreadsheet and figure out the percent changes in the budget.” I also said they should be able to query a database, but not every reporter would have to know stats like linear regression. “An introduction to statistics is essential, but any depth is a waste of time.”
I was 22. It was 1997. We all make bad calls sometime.
But how do I know about this? Because the very same college that I wrote this proposal and subsequent manual for is now my employer. The same employer where I now teach data journalism. And that employer is cleaning out the archives, and today they found a file with my name on it.
In the file were notes from my senior exit interview. In that interview, I said that I was “not totally satisfied with the core courses” and believed the college should hire a data journalism/reporting professor like Steve Doig. Absolutely nothing has changed since that day. I’m still not totally satisfied with the core courses, and I would cut off a toe it it meant we got to hire Steve.
But also in that file was the proposal for the data journalism course and the course materials I wrote for the credit.
It’s equal parts cringe worthy and things I teach now, 19 years later.
In it, I introduce strange lingo like ASCII text, delimiters and zip files. I show how to use Excel to measure change in populations. I show how to group and count some crime data to show what day the Lincoln Police Department got the most larceny reports (in 1995) using SQL. I talked about how to negotiate for data, and avoid being overcharged for data by bureaucrats who didn’t want to give up digital records. I showed people how to sign up for NICAR-L (which I joined in 1995 and have been on ever since). I even talked about how to use the web to find data. How? By using Dogpile, of course, to search for the Census Bureau’s population projections data set. Google didn’t exist when I wrote this.
There’s even a joke where the punchline is Quattro Pro.
I also made a bad bet on the geek/nerd label. The manual is called “Geek Like Me” and I talked about how everyone wanted to be a geek now. Alas, nerds ended up being the preferred term.
From what I can tell, the manual was read by the department chair – he noted a dozen or so typos in highlighter – and it was put in a file. To my knowledge, the document was never used. We can surmise that file somehow survived the retirement of that department chair, survived the move from one building to another one across campus, and has sat in a filing cabinet for, let’s be honest, no good reason at all until this week.
My copy of it was put on a Zip Disk where I thought it would be safe. I long ago lost the ability to read that disk, if I could even find it. I had just assumed that my efforts – strung out over a series of all-nighters – had just faded into nothing. To be honest, I had forgotten all about it until today.
In the 14 years between my graduation and me being hired as a professor of practice, a course appeared on the books: JOUR407 Investigative and Computer Assisted Reporting. No one here now knows how it got there, who proposed it, or if it was ever taught before I got here. But I teach that course now. And all of my materials are online.
Here’s hoping GitHub doesn’t go the way of the Zip Disk.