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 to them for free.
- 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.
- Sports Data Analysis and Visualization, a Quarto-based book on using R and the Tidyverse to analyze and visualize sports data. Repo
- 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.
- Data Journalism with R and the Tidyverse Tutorials, a set of LearnR tutorials on how to do analytic journalism using R and public data. Rewrite in progress.
- Getting Started with Drone Journalism, a Quarto-based book on how to pass the FAA's knowledge exam and start using drones for journalism.
*Note: My employer used the image above to get students to come to UNL in a video where I read anonymous student comments about me. You can judge my Twitter game for yourself. It's not the first time they used me in ads for the university. Or recuiting materials. Or alumni relations.