Didn’t make it this year to NICAR in Jacksonville, Florida, where attendees worked through issues around data analysis and visualization, FOIA, and more (including a Trump rally and a bullriding outing)? You may have missed the company of hundreds of people working in investigative and data journalism, but luckily, there’s great documentation from the weekend (there was even a friendly conference concierge Twitter bot, which Quartz’s Bot Studio tested out at this year’s NICAR).

I trawled through Twitter and many of the presentations to find a few fun and useful ones for the Nieman Lab crowd. Since I wasn’t at the conference myself, I’m drawing from an incomplete selection, so feel free to suggest more:

— You may find some useful tidbits in this reassuring lightning talk with advice for those picking up coding for the first time, this talk on how newsrooms can get ahead on Trump stories in an age of Saturday morning presidential tweetstorms, and this talk on everything The New York Times has learned about reporting on elections and live election results (including: don’t forget about the District of Columbia). (If all the videos are posted online, we’ll update with a link.)

— This talk, on getting data from the social web (and guidelines on a way to do it efficiently and properly).

— How to make data approachable, for younger audiences: Stop focusing only on shiny, flashy, expensive-to-build interactive experiences for Snapchat, and consider better ways of integrating graphics and numbers, and interactives that put the reader in the middle of the data and lets them explore it for themselves.

— A how-to on making data gifs.

— Some ways to think about mining Google Trends effectively, and accurately (make sure you know what it actually means when a term is “trending”).

— These tips on “putting your town under a microscope, and keeping it there.”

Chrys Wu, as always, has your back with her far more comprehensive comprehensive hub for presentations, lightning talk slides, links to relevant software and tools, and other resources.

#NICAR17
• Data into MS Access @pulhitzherprize
• ⚾️⚽️data @sdoig
• PDFs⛏ @twallackhttps://t.co/kBovmNKWUg

— Chrys Wu (@MacDiva) March 5, 2017

Many more tipsheets and links from the sessions are available on the Investigative Reporters and Editors site here.