Journalism
40 mins
Open data research for journalists
- Abstract:
- Data are everywhere - if you know where to look. This course will show you who is publishing data, and how to find it. Using publicly available data to tell stories is becoming more and more important for journalists today. Learning how to source and verify data is essential to finding important stories. But before you begin telling a story, how do you go about finding open data in the first place?
- About this course:
- This is an introduction for anyone wanting to get into data-driven journalism who doesn’t know where to start. It is designed for journalists who are interested in learning how to research open data. It gives an overview of what is meant by open data, why the open data movement is important and how to find trusted data. The course will also cover the laws around data privacy and how best to store and share data that protects the identity of individuals and doesn’t harm them during and after your research and publication.
- What do I learn:
- By the end of the course you will know how to find sources of data online, where the official sites are, and who is publishing data for anyone to use.
- What do I need to know:
- If you have access to the internet and can use a browser, you have all you need to get started - you can learn in another course what to do with data once you have it and want to analyse it.
Trainers
Jonathan Stoneman
Jonathan Stoneman worked for the BBC for 20 years as researcher, producer, reporter, editor and finally Head of Training at World Service. He is a data journalism trainer and passionate about the open data movement.
- 1.1 Introduction to course1.2 Who publishes open data?1.3 What can data do for me? Interview with Megan Lucero1.4 How open is open data?1.5 Open data quiz
- 2.1 Main sources of data2.2 Quiz: Sources for data
- 3.1 Government and other sources3.2 Searching for data: Using advanced search techniques3.3 What if it's a PDF?3.4 Exercise: Find the table3.5 Scraping data3.6 Interview with data journalist Leila Haddou3.7 Quiz: Handling datasets and scraping
- 4.1 Privacy and the law4.2 Quiz: Handling data and privacy
- 5.1 Making progress with data5.2 Conclusion
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