This year’s Dataharvest included a lot of data skills training. Our fantastic trainers have lifted the veil on spreadsheets analysis, cleaning data, explored caveats in visualizing data. We have asked basic questions – what is data, what does it look like and how to even start a data research? However, we have also challenged our participants with some programming – there was Python, R, SQL, regex and Neo4j. We have introduced some robust software for investigations such as Aleph and QGIS, but also simple tools to scrape websites or read PDFs. We have shown how to think as a data scientist, statistician, and open source researcher. But what now?
It’s time to find a project. Cementing the skills by putting them into practice. For the first time ever, Dataharvest offers you, on top of the skills training, also a possibility to practice these skills. In a so-called Data Sprint our participants will have the opportunity to collaborate with others and create their own stories.
Our participants will be working with the recently released European COVID-19 spending data by OCCRP in a cross-border teams of 3 to 4. There are many potential stories in those data – for many different countries and media. There are also quite some challenges in cleaning them!
We have 12 spots in this course! Do you want to secure one and make your own story together with others and under guidance of experienced data trainers? Write to adriana@journalismarena.eu and make space in your calendar as described here.
If you register for one of the limited spaces on this mini-project, you commit to downloading and looking at the data before the first session, and so to joining that session with some ideas of what you would like to do with the data.
If more than 12 register for the data sprint, the participants will be selected to give the best representation of gender, countries and experience. Participants that have regularly attended the data sessions will get a priority. The participants will be informed about the selection on Friday 20th.