The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is pleased to announce that registration is now open for its free online data journalism course Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools.
This five-module introductory course gives participants the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data and produce compelling stories under tight deadlines. It is open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection who wants to tell stories with data.
This EJC initiative is supported by Google, the Dutch Ministry of Education and the African Media Initiative, and features a stellar line-up of instructors and advisors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nacion Argentina, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others.
Josh Hatch, Senior Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and member of the Advisory Board for this course, says:
“Thanks to the European Journalism Centre’s work to foster data journalism’s move into the mainstream, reporters and editors can gain insights from the best in the business. Whether you want to get over your fear of Excel, learn the language of your data geeks, or discover how to tell stories with data visualisations, this course will help journalists and newsrooms learn how to take advantage of these invaluable skills. This is a very good thing.”
The course is planned to start early 2014 and the instruction language will be English. More details about the course and how to register are available at: www.datadrivenjournalism.net/course.
Can’t wait to get started? Refresh your skills by reading the European Journalism Centre and Open Knowledge Foundation’s earlier project, the Data Journalism Handbook before the course starts or stay in touch with happenings in the Data Journalism World via the Data Journalism Mailing List.
This post is cross-posted from Moran Barkai’s post on DataDrivenJournalism.net.
The Data Journalism Handbook has reached a new milestone today with the publication of its third translation, into French, entitled Guide du datajournalisme.
The handbook is a free, collaborative book that aims to help journalists use data to improve journalism. It provides inspiring examples from news organisations across the world and a collection of tips and techniques from leading journalists, professors, software developers and data analysts. The book is the product of a collaboration between the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation and was published in its original English version about a year ago.
Translated by the French publisher Eyrolles and edited by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, CEO and co-founder of Journalism++, and Editorial Board member of this website, the French edition is augmented with recent examples from French and Belgian publications such as Le Monde, Rue89 and France Soir.
Cover of Guide du datajournalisme, based on graphics by Kate Hudson.
For Kayser-Bril, the need to publish a French edition of the book stems from the particular position of the French press. “France has some of the most pure-players in the news market. French journalists have done many innovating investigations in the past few years. Despite these very positive developments, the feeling still looms that francophone journalism is coming late to the technology party. The French version of the handbook, adding examples from France and Belgium to the original book, gives the French-speaking data journalism community a uniting reference point. The online adaptation, open-sourced on GitHub, will be improved and updated by the community itself to prepare the next versions of the handbook”, said Kayser-Bril.
The French translation of the graphic by Lulu Pinney, showing what is in the book.
Jean Abbiateci, a French freelance journalist and one of the winners of this year’s edition of the Data Journalism Awards, is one of the new authors added to the list of over 70 contributors to the book. In the case study entitled “Une pige de ‘scraping olimpique'”, Abbiateci recounts his work on obtaining and cleaning data for an application for the national public radio, France Info, dedicated to the London 2012 summer Olympics.
Hardcopies of the French edition of the handbook can be purchased from the website of Eyrolles. The book is freely available online on Journalism++ and the /source can be found on GitHub.
A Russian and a Spanish translation of the handbook have already been published and three other translations, into Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese, are in progress and will be published later this year.
I am pleased to be joining the School of Data, where I will be focusing on how civil society organisations (CSOs) and advocacy groups are using data to pursue their mission, in the service of the public good – from greater election transparency, to alerting people in conflict zones to attacks, and reporting and advocacy around energy and climate change.
Over the coming weeks, we are going to be collecting the best examples of how CSOs are using data to improve their research, to boost their advocacy and outreach, or simply to inform and assist their work, by using analysis, visualisations and other means.
If you know of any particularly compelling examples, then we’d love to hear from you. You can contact me via email (liliana.bounegru[at]okfn.org), this form or Twitter using the hashtag #data4csos. We’ll be featuring case studies and behind the scenes stories based on some of the best examples on the School of Data blog.
The School of Data Journalism, Europe's biggest data journalism event, brings together around 20 panelists and instructors from Reuters, New York Times, Spiegel, Guardian, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and others, in a mix of discussions and hands-on sessions focusing on everything from cross-border data-driven investigative journalism, to emergency reporting and using spreadsheets, social media data, data visualisation and maping for journalism.
In this post we will be listing links shared during this training event. The list will be updated as the sessions progress. If you have links shared during the sessions that we missed, post them in the comments section and we will update the list.
Video recordings
Panel Discussions
- Panel 1: The State of Data Journalism in 2013
- Panel 2: Data and Investigations: Collaborating Across Borders
- Panel 3: Data Journalism in Southern Europe
- Panel 4: Covering Emergencies in the Age of Big Data
Workshops
- Workshop 1: Excel for Journalists, with Steve Doig
- Workshop 2: Social network analysis for journalists using the Twitter API
- Workshop 3: Making visualisations – a survival guide
- Workshop 4: Data visualisation, maps and timelines on a shoestring
Slides, tutorials, articles
- Tutorial and data files from Workshop 1: Excel for Journalists, with Steve Doig (the tutorial is also available as a blog post here)
- Tutorial from Workshop 2: Social Network Analysis for Journalists Using the Twitter API, with Michael Bauer
- Walkthrough, data and tools from Workshop 2: Social Network Analysis for Journalists Using the Twitter API, with Michael Bauer
- Tipsheet Workshop 3: Making Data Visualisations: A Survival Guide
What makes a great visualisation and what is the right type of visualisation for the job? by Gregor Aisch.
Coverage
- Article about Panel 2: Data and Investigations: Collaborating Across Borders by journalism.co.uk
- Data journalism in 2013: lots to be excited about – article about Panel 1: The State of Data Journalism in 2013 by Editors Weblog
Tools and other resources
- Source, an index of news developer source code, code walkthroughs and project breakdowns from journalist-coders
- School of Data – online tutorials for working with data
- The Data Journalism Handbook – reference book about how to use data to improve the news authored by 70 data journalism practitioners and advocated
- Open Refine for data cleaning
- Gephi for graph visualisations
- Hashtagify visualisation of Twitter hashtags related to a particular #tag)
- Investigative Dashboard methodologies, resources, and links for journalists to track money, shareholders, and company ownership across international borders
- Tabula open-source application that allows users to upload PDFs and extract the data in them in CSV format
- Topsy. Social Media Analysis tool mentioned in panel on Covering emergencies.
- DataSift Mentioned in panel on Covering emergencies.
- Storyful The social media Newswire for Newsrooms
- GeoFeedia Search and Monitor Social Media by Location.
- Spokeo “Spokeo is a people search engine that organizes White-pages listings, Public Records and Social Network Information to help you safely find & learn about people.”
- The Tor project Useful in environments likely to suffer from censorship. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.
Projects and organisations
- Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (regional group of non-profit investigative centers and independent media stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia)
- Wobbing.eu (network of European journalists focused on Freedom of Information)
- Offshore Leaks (investigation into the people behind companies in tax havens worldwide)
- International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
- FarmSubsidy.org
- FishSubsidy.org
- ProPublica (US-based investigative journalism outlet)
- NPR Elections Big Board
- Investigative Reporters and Editors (US-based association of investigative journalists)
- Datajournalism.it (Italian website dedicated to data journalism)
Enjoyed this? Want to stay in touch? Join the School of Data Announce Mailing List for updates on more training activities from the School of Data or the Data Driven Journalism list for discussions and news from the world of Data Journalism.
This post was written by Liliana Bounegru from the European Journalism Centre. It is cross-posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net.
As you may know, The Data Journalism Handbook is a free collaborative book that shows journalists how to use data to improve the news. When we first published it last year, we put out an open call to see if there were people interested in helping to translate the book into their language. The response was overwhelming. A couple of months later, we had over 400 registrants. Since then we’ve been hard at work to set up a global translation initiative – working with journalists, media organisations and universities to translate and localise the book for audiences around the world.
Today we are pleased to announce that a group of over 30 Brazilian journalists and students are translating the book into Portuguese. The project is coordinated by Brazil’s leading investigative journalism network, Abraji, with the support of the European Journalism Centre (EJC). “Since its foundation, ten years ago, Abraji has been working hard to expand CAR and data journalism in Brazil. So, it’s almost an obligation and certainly an honour for us to help translate The Data Journalism Handbook to Portuguese. Brazilian journalists will gain a lot,” says José Roberto de Toledo, Abraji vice-president and pioneer of CAR in Brazil.
Abraji and EJC will be working closely with the recently announced Iberoamerican Data Journalism Handbook, which will be building on our Data Journalism Handbook to produce a guide specifically targeted at a Latin American audience.
Three other translations, into Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, are in progress and will be published later this year. The book has already been translated into Russian. If your media organisation is interested in coordinating a translation into your local language, we’d love to hear from you.