As we announced last year, Liliana Bounegru and I are currently co-editing a new edition of the The Data Journalism Handbook which will be published on Amsterdam University Press next year.
As it says in the introduction, the book is “a collective experiment in accounting for data journalism practices and a collective invitation to explore how such practices may be modified”. This includes broadening accounts of data journalism projects to further explore their various settings:
The collection of chapters gathered in the book aim to provide a richer story about what data journalism does, with and for whom. Through our editorial work we have encouraged both reflection and a kind of modesty in articulating what data journalism projects can do, and the conditions under which they can succeed. This entails the cultivation of a different kind of precision in accounting for data journalism practice: specifying the situations in which it develops and operates. Such precision requires broadening the scope of the book to include not just the ways in which data is analysed, created and used in the context of journalism but also more about the social, cultural, political and economic circumstances in which such practices are embedded.
We’ve also proposed “twelve challenges for critical data practice”, drawing on Agre’s notion of “critical technical practice” which he describes in terms of having “one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique”.
Ahead of the book’s publication next year, and as part of the process of gathering feedback on its content and our editorial approach, we’re publishing online previews of several of the chapters. A working version of the full table of contents for the book is included below.
Beyond these online previews of chapters, if you’re interested testing out further material from the book in the context of teaching or training, please do get in touch. We’re particularly interested in hearing from those who are considering adopting it as on university or higher educational courses for undergraduate and graduate students.
