A Data Journalism Hackathon at King’s College London

djsprint_piccola_sobigdata

On 2nd December 2016, the KCL Digital Humanities Department of King’s College (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/index.aspx) has organised its first data journalism hackathon workshop. The workshop has been organised in collaboration with Open Knowledge (https://okfn.org) and the EU project SoBigData (http://www.sobigdata.eu) and took place in the the beautiful Anatomy Museum of the Strand Campus.

During the workshop, the 32 students of the KCL Data Journalism Course (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/study/pgt/modules-2016-17/optional-modules/7AAVDM12.aspx) collect, analyse and visualise data on a series of societal issues including:

The work of the students was guided by a number data and issue experts including:

  • Alex Cobham (Tax Justice Network)
  • Richard Murphy (City University/Tax Research UK/Tax Justice Network)
  • David Mihalyi (Natural Resource Governance Initiative)
  • Milena Marin (Amnesty International)
  • Ben Meghreblian (Open Knowledge International)

and was supported by professional data journalist

  • Tom Wills (The Times)
  • Leila Haddou (Financial Times)

Finally, a small team of academics was present to support and facilitate the work:

  • Jonathan Gray (University of Bath)
  • Liliana Bounegru (University of Groningen/the University of Ghent)
  • Tobias Blanke (King’s College London)
  • Niranjan Sivakumar (médialab Sciences Po Paris)
  • Tommaso Venturini (King’s College London/INRIA)

Divided in small groups the students and the experts worked hard the for an entire day ‘crunching’ data coming from different source, validating their reliability, analysing them with advanced statistical methods and visualising them through the various static and interactive diagrams. A partnership with the French start-up Matlo allowed the participants to use a particularly advanced ‘exploratory data analysis’ tool.

Once finalised the data stories produced during the workshop will be published at http://www.tommasoventurini.it/wp/kcldataj/

And here are some pictures of the event:

djsprint12 djsprint11
djsprint10 djsprint9
djsprint8 djsprint1
djsprint2 djsprint3
djsprint4 djsprint5
djsprint6 djsprint7
logo-sobigdata
-->