Summer Conference Events

Who is the mysterious person behind a mining contract in the Central African Republic? What do you do when you have only a very common name and no photos? And what to do when a Twitter account is completely deleted?

First aid for your data journalism learning problems. When you’re diving into a new field of expertise, it can be overwhelming. Our trainer is here to help: tell her what you’d like to learn and why it hasn’t worked out so far, and she’ll try to point you to the online toolkit or resource you didn’t know you needed.

If you’re wondering if there’s something a bit fishy about a dataset, but you don’t know where to start looking, you might get some relief from a weird quirk of numbers called Benford’s Law that’s ready to help in your search.

Forensic Architecture work on human rights violation investigations with a range of different partners, from international prosecutors to media organisations. This session will provide an insight on this work from the mindset of both an architect and a journalist, with examples and workshop exercises in image analysis, geo-locating, and interpreting video.

The session will teach you ways to investigate an individual or company’s finances. It will take you on a virtual trip around the world to show how to access public records in offshore jurisdictions and the stories they can yield.

We use data in our investigations to find out about the the scale of a problem that is affecting people, systems that aren’t helping them, or to shine a light on particular individuals. This workshop focuses on techniques for finding the human stories that help bring that data to life, from scoping the characters and […]

Cross-border stories – wow… but how do you get started? In this workshop we discuss the quality of cross-border journalism ideas: how to systematically develop a cross-border story, how to deal with cross-border aspects of a local story, and how to find potential team members to further develop the story idea with.

The Data Escape Room is a 60 minute data-driven challenge designed to test and develop your data skills with additional 60 minutes allowed for questions and individual help. Working in a small team you will be given a selection of real data and tasked with working out what the story is.

Visit the security zone in the Atrium with your laptop and learn how to set up tools to browse anonymously, chat and mail with encryption and prevent data-loss from theft/confiscation of laptops and storage media.

Session 1: This session will outline the basics of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and how you can apply it to your research, campaigns and investigations. We’ll go through the type of information that can be accessed from government bodies and how you can draft effective requests to get the most out of the Act.