Summer Conference Events

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.

This session on covert filming has evolved over the years into a state-of-the-art technical workshop looking at methods to acquire evidence for public interest investigations. It is taught by a leading undercover technician and an experienced television reporter who discuss the process and ethics of going undercover and look at the latest high-quality equipment.

In this session you’re going to learn how to make data visualisations and interactives using Flourish. Flourish is a tool that allows journalists and non-coders to create high-end data visualisations and interactives, it’s free for newsrooms.

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 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.