As Liliana Bounegru and I are preparing the manuscript of the Data Journalism Handbook: Towards A Critical Data Practice (forthcoming, Amsterdam University Press), here is the full transcript of an interview we did about the book with the European Journalism Centre in December 2018, selections of which were published here and here.
Why another Data Journalism Handbook?
We were really lucky with the previous edition, which seemed a good fit for the moment in 2012. It has been widely translated and adopted as a core text on data journalism courses and trainings around the world. We designed it to age well, providing not just practical guidance on how to work with data, but also a diverse snapshot of the hopes and practices of data journalists at that particular moment in time.
The field of data journalism has travelled a long way since 2012. Not just because of more sophisticated technologies, but also because the social, cultural, political and economic settings of the field have changed. We’ve seen not only major initiatives like the Snowden leaks and the Panama Papers, but also debates and controversies around the role of data, platforms and digital technologies in society. Lots of tough questions have been raised about what data journalism is, who it is for and what it might do in digital societies.
Rather than just having a narrower focus on data practices, we take a broader look at these questions and consider what we might learn from them. In parallel to doing the first edition of the handbook, we’ve also gone through our graduate studies and into universities where we’ve been researching these kinds of questions about the societal implications of digital data, methods and platforms. The new edition of the book is our attempt to make sense of the field of data journalism and its changing role in the contemporary world, thinking along with a diverse mix of practitioners and researchers.
A lot has changed since 2012 in the data journalism landscape, what does it mean for the book and for you as editors?
To use a metaphor: there was a time when the number of readily available books in the world was small enough that it was not considered crazy for a librarian to try to build what they could consider a pretty comprehensive collection of books. Their acquisitions policy could just be: “whatever we can get our hands on”. In 2012, it might have not have seemed so crazy to, for example, have a go at making a list of data journalists and their projects from around the world. One very practical consequence for us as editors is that we cannot kid ourselves about our partiality: can only hope to cover a comparatively small number of the projects, practices and themes in this ever-growing field, and it was a difficult job to decide what to focus on in the book.
Also, as we’ve mentioned above, there have been many debates and controversies about the role and status of data journalism, which we’ve sought unpack and address in the book, as well as examining its relation to other developments. Since 2012 we have seen the rise of questions about the societal implications of technology precipitated by actors, events and issues as diverse as Snowden, Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, the Syrian civil war, Cambridge Analytica, Gamergate, #metoo, #IdleNoMore, Black Lives Matter, strikes and walkouts from tech workers, Uber riots, the European refugee crisis, Facebook’s News Feed algorithms, “fake news” and misinformation, the Gab platform and the rise of far-right populism and extremism. Several chapters in the book suggest how data journalists might attend to and position themselves in relation to such phenomena.
In 2012, there were not so many resources for learning data journalism. Now there are plenty more. How will this book be different from other data journalism resources out there?
There are indeed now so many useful resources (and there were too in 2012) – from practical tutorials and MOOCs on tools, code, visualisations, design and machine learning techniques, to “behind the scenes” blog posts and commentaries. Such resources will continue to evolve and are “best served fresh” from a variety of different sources.
The new edition of the book takes a step back from this more “hands on” material, and provides space to reflect on different aspects of contemporary data journalism practice. We have felt such a need for such a book when teaching data journalism on several courses – and in particular to complement more practical materials with practitioner perspectives as well as research perspectives from fields such as science and technology studies, media studies, internet studies and journalism studies. This provides a richer context for introducing data journalists’ particular blend of methods and approaches for working with data – examining not just the “how” but also the “what”, “where”, “when”, “why” and “for whom”.
How did you personally fall into data journalism? What fascinates you about it?
We both have a professional background in this area, and met at a data journalism conference which Liliana organised in Amsterdam in 2010. At that time Jonathan was working at an NGO called Open Knowledge International and particularly interested in data visualisations and the politics of public data (also going back to early 20th century experiments such as the Isotype Institute), at the same time as pursuing his graduate studies in London. Liliana was leading data journalism activities at the European Journalism Centre, at the same time as undertaking graduate studies at the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam (where she later became Managing Director).
We were both fascinated by emerging practices around how the world is accounted for through data – not just through established institutions such as national statistics bodies, but also through experimental and inventive modes of storytelling and participation with data in journalism and civil society. Such data practices would not just produce accounts of the world through data, but they’d also have to assemble publics for their work. We were also interested in how such projects would aspire to attend to collective life at scale, including environmental, social, political, economic and cultural dynamics beyond the to-and-fro of talking heads.
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