Today Liliana Bounegru and I gave a talk on what data journalists and digital researchers can learn from each other. This is part of a symposium on “Digital Humanities + Data Journalism” organised by Alberto Cairo at the University of Miami.

Our talk was based on our work both in the fields of data journalism (e.g. through our work on The Data Journalism Handbook and associated data projects and training activities), ongoing research about data journalism (including on the use of networks and journalism code ecologies), as well as our work on digital methods research in the humanities and social sciences with the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and the médialab at Sciences Po in Paris.

The slides are available here. For reference, below is a summary of the main points and links to some of the things that we mentioned in the talk. We’ll be writing up something on this topic in due course.

We’d like to continue to develop an agenda looking at how data journalists and digital researchers can work together – particularly through the data sprint format. If you’re interested in this, please do get in touch.

“Data work” in journalism and research

1. There are similarities between data work in data journalism and digital research.
2. Data tools are attuned to different ways of knowing and ways of working.
3. There are many different types of “data work”.
4. There are different ways of valorising and evaluating data.
5. Different forms of data work require different kinds of tools.
6. A single tool can be used in different ways in different contexts.

Areas and formats of collaboration between data journalism and digital research

1. Shaping the future of big data.
2. Creating “just good enough” data.
3. Aligning data work with broader societal concerns .
4. Archiving data projects.
5. Expanding visual imagination.
6. Learning and collaborating through “data sprints”.

Links to projects, initiatives and publications in the talk

• The Data Journalism Handbook (O’Reilly Media, 2012)
• Doing Journalism with Data MOOC
• The School of Data
• The Digital Methods Initiative (@digitalmethods) at the University of Amsterdam – and their tools
• The médialab (@medialab_ScPo) at Sciences Po – and their tools
• Talk on digital methods and discussion with Bruno Latour at Tow Center, Columbia University
• Five types of data work in digital research
• “Computational Social Science” (Lazer et al, 2009)
• Cultural Analytics
• Culturomics
• Altmetrics

• Digital Methods (Rogers, 2013)

• Paper on “Narrating Networks: Exploring the Affordances of Networks as Storytelling Devices in Journalism”
• ProPublica’s Machine Bias series
• Big Data and Society special issue on critical data studies
• Share Lab’s series on Facebook’s algorithms
• Jennifer Gabrys’s Citizen Sense project
• Our Changing What Counts report on how civil society data is used to change official data collection
• Scott Klein’s work towards archiving news apps
• Short video on the data sprint collaboration format from the Techno-Anthropology Lab at the University of Aalborg