Summer Conference Events

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 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.

What to do when Excel is not enough to crunch your data and hardcore coding is not your style? SQL is like Excel, but on steroids!

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.