Data Journalism. Work session (VIII)

By now, it’s common knowledge that the aim of data journalism is to explain the same old stories better, and to use statistical and visualisation tools to discover new ones. These data journalism sessions focus on exploring the new uses, tools, programmes and resources that can help us come to grips with our reality.

 As it’s always a good idea to put things into perspective, this latest session leaps into the international data journalism scene with the journalist Ben Welsh, Director of the Los Angeles Times Data Desk. Ben will offer an insight into the reality of this field at the Los Angeles Times and explain how his department works.

 5 pm // “What is a Data Desk?” with Ben Welsh, journalist from the Los Angeles Times

 For years now, data journalism has claimed its place within the editorial offices of many media outlets in the United States, Great Britain and Latin America. This is a good opportunity to talk about how this journey was made by the Los Angeles Times data journalism team: from how the Data Desk began to how it is structured, focusing particularly on specific stories, particularly in the city of Los Angeles, and looking at the way they have approached different cases (election results, crime alerts in L.A. neighbourhoods, etc) that have earned them international recognition.

 6-8 pm // “Web Scraping” beginners workshop, with Ben Welsh.

Data often appear in formats that we haven’t mastered or in non-uniform ways. Scraping helps us to get around this, because it allows us to extract hidden data from websites, PDFs, etc. for subsequent use. In this workshop Ben Walsh will explain the tools required to extract data from the Web using Python programming language.