Howdy
I'm Matt Waite, a professor of practice in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I teach programming to communicators through data journalism and sports data classes. I also started a drone journalism lab to study how to use flying robots for journalism and to teach students how to do it right. I've been teaching since 2011. Before that, I worked in daily newspapers in Arkansas and Florida, last at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), where in 2007 I was the principal developer behind PolitFact.com, which became the first website to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
I believe passionately in making my materials open and I believe textbook pricing is out of control. So, where I can, I make custom materials for my classes for students and give it all away for free.
Current materials
- Sports Data Analysis and Visualization Tutorials, a set of interactive tutorials in how to use the Tidyverse to analyze and visualize sports data. Uses LearnR to display the tutorials.
- Data Journalism with R and the Tidyverse Tutorials, a set of LearnR tutorials on how to do analytic journalism using R and public data. Soon to be replaced.
- In Progress: The Art of Data Journalism: An R-based data journalism class in a box. A series of LearnR tutorials that takes students from the basics of rows and columns to publication-ready graphics using local data for them. Once a location is set, the tutorials use data, geography and examples from that place to make it relevant to where students live. Official launch in January 2025.
- Getting Started with Drone Journalism, a Quarto-based book on how to pass the FAA's knowledge exam and start using drones for journalism.
- Advanced Sports Data Analysis, an in-progress Quarto-based book on using R, the Tidyverse and Tidymodels to bring machine learning into predicting outcomes in sports.
Archival materials
- Sports Data Analysis and Visualization, a Quarto-based book on using R and the Tidyverse to analyze and visualize sports data. Repo
- Data Journalism With R, a Quarto-based book on using R and the Tidyverse to analyze and visualize data for journalism. Repo
Socials
My employer uses me in ads for the university. And recuiting materials. And alumni relations. My kids hate it.