Summer Conference Events

Design thinking is a methodology for building better news products. It is used by some of the largest, most innovative news sites in the world to rapidly develop and test new products and features. In these hands-on workshops, we will learn the basics of design thinking, and how this approach has revolutionised the process.

Story-Based Inquiry 1: Hypothesise Your Story Investigation has a dirty name with editors, who think it’s about slowly rummaging through piles of garbage till you find (or don’t find) a jewel. Too often, they’re right.

Excel 1: The Power of Data Analysis for Stories Data is everywhere and spreadsheets can help reporters to find story ideas in the data. This course introduces data analysis using Microsoft Excel. Participants will learn basic calculations, rates, ratios and analytic tools that generate story ideas.

Googlesheets 1 Data journalism introduction: an overview of the seven building blocks behind data stories. The basics: using Googlesheets to carry out basic calculations and percentage increases. Googlesheets 2 Finding your top line: sorting and filtering in Googlesheets/Excel.

In data journalism, we tend to use relational databases – data in table form – such as Excel or SQL to do our analysis and find stories. Graph databases are different, but are incredibly useful to find connections or patterns within our data that would be difficult, if not impossible, to spot using a relational database.

In the first class, R-1, you’ll be shown the basics and get familiar with R and RStudio, import data and learn some functions for getting to grips with your dataset including sorting and filtering. This class assumes no prior experience with R.

In these hands-on sessions you will be introduced to some of the basic techniques to get started on scraping data for investigations: investigation ideas: how to spot opportunities to use scraping and automation in investigations scraping basics: finding structure in HTML and URLs; what’s possible with programming simple scraping jobs: how to write a basic scraper in five minutes data journalism tools: the challenges of scraping hundreds of webpages, dozens of documents, or the invisible contents of databases.