The Poynter Institute’s NewsU is offering a webinar on Thursday Oct. 21 to train reporters, producers, editors and others to use the tools available through Patchwork Nation to deepen their political reporting.

Knight Foundation provided Pathwork Nation with $450,000 in funding to extend its unique nationwide community mapping project beyond counties, drilling down into congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections.

Patchwork Nation is a reporting project first started by Dante Chinni, a former Christian Science Monitor reporter, and University of Maryland Professor James G. Gimpel.’ The project crunches demographic data to give reporters the ability to look at their communities in sophisticated detail, going beyond the simplistic red state/blue state analysis or soccer mom/Joe Six-Pack cliches.

Pathwork Nation divides the country into 12 types of communities, based on demographic data like income level, religion and race.

The project was first launched at the Christian Science Monitor as a way to cover the 2008 presidential election.’ Patchwork Nation now partners with the Christian Science Monitor, the NewsHour, Politco and WNYC Radio as well as a variety of local public broadcasting stations around the country. It also makes its data available to the public and to reporters around the country.

Chinni and Gimpel recently released a book, Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth About the ‘Real’ America, about the sometimes surprising divisions in the United States.

As Chinni writes in the first chapter of the book, ‘(Americans) want to understand the parts of the country that seem foreign to us. The great failing of the blue/red view of the United States is that it expresses little beyond the lever someone pulled in a voting booth. It suggests that blue cities or counties or states are all blue for the same reasons. But they rarely are. In some communities elections are primarily about economics. In others, they may be about religion or energy policy.’

Patchwork Nation strives to help Americans understand each other and themselves better.

The webinar costs $9.95 and begins at 2 p.m. EST.