Earlier this month we
spoke to the #DJCamp2012 co-host Megan Knight to find out the kind of invaluable
data journalism skills will be on show when UCLan plays host the event on the
21st and 22nd of September. With a far spanning data journalism career, Senior
lecturer Megan Knight is no stranger to the art of scraping, scouring and
churning out data to produce compelling stories and engaging visuals. She talks
about her experience in the field and what will be on offer at
#DJCamp2012.
What can we
expect at DJCamp2012?
"The workshop covers the
basic 'whys and wherefores' of data journalism, from why it's an important part
of journalism to finding information in data form by looking at sources of data.
On the second day, we will be looking at representation and actually working
with data that has been found, to develop publishable data journalism material
in whatever form it may take. We’re going to be focusing specifically on
Google fusion tables,
which is a
publically available
tool from Google, and in particular, mapping,
which is invaluable in terms of developing
things like interactive feautres where you can gather data from your readers and
then represent it. So the workshop goes from a kind of conceptual workshop
with discussions about what
data journalism is and why it’s important, throught to practical hands on
projects."
Are there
optional workshops?
"There will also be a
free optional workshop with ScraperWiki, which will look at the process of
scraping data. This is essentially the process of finding and analysing
data, cleaning it and reworking it in order to put
it into the right forms and the right formats."
What do aim for
participants to achieve by the end of the workshops?
"We aim that
participants will be able to find and present data by the end of the workshop,
not just in an abstract sence of 'here’s a sample of what you would do', but in
a concrete sence of actually finding something that’s relevant to what it is
they're currently working on, and then working through the workshop with that
data. So the real goal at the end is to have projects that people can return to
newsrooms with to develop it further and actually publish. So the idea is to
really make it very hands on, very practical."
So before you
entered the world of academia, you were a data
journalist?
"I think I’ve
been doing data journalism since before we called it that. One of my previous
jobs was working on election coverage and census coverage in
South
Africa. We worked with scientists and programmers to
showcase election results and look for
correlations and changes between voting patterns, changes in the
demographics, and development
issues. We
were working with these massive data sets of information
to present stories about South Africa and
stories about the country beyond the simple, 'Thabo Mbeki is going to be
president' which was the case in 1999, to patterns in
people’s
voting, and fundamentally, stories about change.
I looked at how we could correlate that what we knew
about demographics, about income, about education, about
language,
facilities and services and so
on with voting behaviour.
"That’s really, to my
mind, an important part of journalism because it gives you a way into stories
that weren’t necessarily the stories people wanted us to tell.
Data is to me, not about numbers, but about the
hidden patterns that numbers can make visible. To me, that was really
interesting and since then I’ve always been very interested in data and
information. Now I'm also interested in social media, the
kind of information that’s available on the internet
and also in collaborative data (projects where people tell you, as a news
organization what is going on in their environment and you then map that). I
recently finished a book on the impact of social media in journalism which
incorporates a lot of information about data journalism, about crowdsourcing and
things like that. So this workshop really fits in with my interests which I'm
hoping to develop further and do more with."
The Digtial Editors
Network (DEN) has combined forced with the MADE Project at UCLan to present two
linked data journalism workshops on 21 and 22 September at the Media Factory in
Preston.
DJCAMP2012 is a two-day
workshop hosted with Paul Bradshaw and Megan Knight. The workshops will cover
the key stages of data journalism, from spotting leads for data stories, to
finding the data in the first place, interrogating it, and visualising
it.
Over two days, aside from
gaining practical advice, participants will have the chance to apply their
learning through hands-on exercises with the help of international-recognised
digital journalism leaders and trainers provided by the Digital Editors Network
and the MADE project.
Scraping Master class is a
four-hour workshop with ScraperWiki founder Julian Todd, 9:30-13:30 on Saturday,
September 22 and will cover a range of topics from creating data extraction
programmes to analysing existing datasets.
MADE blog followers can recieve a 30% registration discount by using the code DENdata
