Data Driven 2023

David Weisz, Director of Humber College’s StoryLab, will provide a welcome and land acknowledgement followed by a few words from Andrew Wicken, Head of News Partnerships at Google Canada.

Have a whole whack of PDFs to parse through? Need to build an interactive data visualization on a deadline? Google Journalist Studio offers a selection of powerful tools to help journalists pursue data-driven stories. This year, Google’s Colleen Kimmett will lead a hands-on demonstration of two of these tools: Pinpoint and Flourish. (Bring Your Own Laptop)

Download Colleen’s presentation here.

Archiving and analyzing social media posts has long been one of the most painstaking tasks journalists can face in the newsroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way! In this intensive workshop, Bellingcat’s Tristan Lee will take you through the ins and outs of of archiving specific content (single videos/social media posts), with Bellingcat’s Auto Archiver tool; ways of archiving larger-scale social media content (entire channel history, multiple channels, etc); as well as some analysis/visualization methods for making sense of larger-scale data.

(Limited Space, Bring Your Own Laptop)

In this hands-on workshop, Globe and Mail data journalists Mahima Singh and Yang Sun will show you how to recreate some of their favourite Globe data projects using Google Sheets. Beginners welcome, though some spreadsheet experience is recommended.

This is a “Bring Your Own Laptop” workshop

Enjoy a boxed a lunch provided by local Toronto caterers Tuck Shop.

So you’ve received a compelling dataset that you know you can turn into an top tier investigative story. Only problem is, it’s dirty. Cleaning dirty data is the most thankless (and unfortunately, most common) issue that data journalists face in the course of their work. Luckily for us, we have a solution!

In this presentation, CBC Nova Scotia investigative journalist Shaina Luck will show you how she used Pivot Tables to report on complaints of racial bias received against Halifax police officers.

Further Reading: Checking for bias

When The Investigative Journalism Foundation launched earlier this year, it quickly carved a niche for itself by launching eight public interest databases available to both the public and paid subscribers. The IJF’s Shaq Singh will talk about the work that went into building and now maintaining these databases.

The Surviving Hate series was created in part to tackle gaps in hate-crime and hate-incident reporting at institutional levels. This involved gathering and contextualizing data from a variety of sources: crowdsourced surveys, media scans, and many, many phone calls and emails. In this panel, StoryLab journalist Janice Saji explains what she learned while working on the project.

The Investigative Journalism Bureau/Toronto Star took home the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Data Journalism award for Suspended, their shocking series exposing the vulnerability of Ontario’s Medical Condition Report (MCR) system. The IJB’s Declan Keogh explains how they did it.

Further Reading: She confided in a doctor about her depression. The next thing she knew, the government took away her driver’s licence

Bellingcat has many investigations on the go at any given time, including one that data scientist Tristan Lee is working on right now. If it publishes before the conference, expect to hear about it at this panel; otherwise, stay tuned for “something cool”.

Globe and Mail data editor Mahima Singh gives an introduction to The Globe’s recently-released Secret Canada project, the most comprehensive resource for navigating Canada’s byzantine freedom-of-information systems.

Further reading: Secret Canada