Data Journalism 2020-21, JOMEC (Cardiff University), MCT559
This is the material and weekly structure for the Data Journalism module taught at Cardiff University's School of Journalism in the Autumn 2020 semester (MSc in Computational & Data Journalism). The course ran for 12 weeks with a weekly four-hour class and, some weeks, an additional three-hour workshop. Questions and observations welcome at [email protected] or @aodhanlutetiae.
Description
Data journalism at its broadest sees any information in a digitised form as a potential journalistic resource. Digging for this information with computerised tools and supplementing it with traditional journalistic methods is the task of the data journalist. Stories are generated when imagination and curiosity are combined with numerical and technical skills; this module sees students apply technology to journalistic questions and begin to produce a portfolio of work.
Course outline
- Week 1 — Spreadsheets, pivot tables and interrogating data
- Week 2 — A story from big messy data & producing charticles
- Week 3 — Data sources (including Freedom of Information)
- Week 4 — How to be a numerate journalist
- Week 5 — Mapping stories
- Week 6 — Visualising data
- Week 7 — Production: Airbnb
- Week 8 — APIs for journalism
- Week 9 — Web scraping for journalism
- Week 10 — Covid-19
- Week 11 — Ethical & legal skills
- Week 12 — Production
Assignments
- These fell in week four, in week eight and just after week 12: numerical analysis, visualisation & full story.
Course resources
Licence
UPDATE The 2021 module is available here