Data is everywhere – we generate data all the time, by living and dying, buying houses, using cars, moving around, etc. Governments and other organisations publish data all the time, which is available for us to explore and analyse. Data, and the patterns we can find in it, often leads to stories or ideas for stories.

In this course, you will learn how to find useful data, how to analyse it, and how to tell stories with it.

COURSE SYLLABUS

01.First Steps in Data Journalism
1.1 – What is data journalism? What can data do for me?
1.2 – Using Data to Find Stories
1.3 – Test Your Skills
02.Interviewing your data
2.1 – Introduction
2.2 – What the data knows – A practical example
2.3 – Pivot Tables
2.4 – Pivoting Step by Step
2.5 – Pivot Tables Demonstration
2.6 – Cleaning Data
2.7 – Cleaning Data Using Open Refine
2.8 – Test Your Skills
03.Visualisation
3.1 – Introduction
3.2 – Visualisations
3.3 – Demonstration
3.4 – Pitfalls to Avoid
3.5 – Good and Bad Visualisations
04.Finding Data
4.1 – Sources of data
4.2 – Advanced Searching
4.3 – Scrape a page
4.4 – Final Exercise
05.Next Steps
5.1 – Introduction
5.2 – Getting Help
5.3 – Useful Websites
06.End of course survey
6.1 – End of course survey

LEARNING OUTCOME

By the end of the first three chapters, you will know what data journalism is, what it can do for you, where to find the data you need, how to analyse it and how to build a simple graphic to show the patterns in the data.

In the fourth chapter we will set you a challenge to work with some real data – and you will then be able to go on and find the data relevant to your own country.

There is a fifth chapter which explains where to get help and training online, as you go further with data.