Data Driven 2024

This is a “Bring Your Own Laptop” workshop

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

Limited to 25 participants

What do you do when your dataset is too complicated or messy to work with in Excel or Google Sheets? Enter Pandas: a comprehensive Python package for most data journalism tasks. It can filter thousands of rows in a spreadsheet quickly or merge multiple datasets to reveal the bigger picture.

This hands-on workshop will feature a crash course in using Pandas. You’ll learn how to make your analysis replicable and transparent to your colleagues by writing code in Google Collab. Think of it as Google Docs for code. We’ll teach you some basics, then get you started doing practical Pandas analysis on an open-source dataset. You’ll hopefully leave with some story ideas and new skills.

Previous coding experience in Python is helpful, but not essential. Absolute beginners to coding are welcome!

Verifying information is an ongoing challenge for journalists. Bellingcat’s Galen Reich and Giancarlo Fiorella will take you through several* tools they’ve developed in-house to aid this process: The Shadow Finder Tool, Grid Search Tool and Belllingcat Filename Finder.

*Time permitting

Note: A laptop is recommended for this workshop

Often, leaked data emerges in ephemeral forms: on a message board, a dark net website, or a social media channel. DDoSecrets works with sources to collect and keep the most valuable leaked information accessible in the long term. The archive now includes more pages than the Library of Congress, including the data from Canadian companies, police, and far right movements. So, what are the risks and rewards of reading other people’s emails? How can you make the most of the available data to inform your investigations?

Learn how to leverage Aleph, OCCRP’s powerful relational database to aid in-depth investigative reporting projects.

Bellingcat’s Giancarlo Fiorella will dive in to the investigative organization’s popular Discord channel, detailing several investigations that resulted from digital collaboration (and how you can help, too!)

Recent Humber Polytechnic graduate (and former StoryLab intern) Liv Chug will talk about their experience working on the Investigative Journalism Foundation’s Procurement database.

Data is not a by-product of journalism and media — it is the product. This discussion will provide an overview of the marketplace of data; why everyone is making money off data but publishers; and how all of this interconnects to the future of journalism in the face of AI.

The Investigative Journalism Bureau spent years fighting to make detailed patient survey data from more than 50 hospitals and health networks across Ontario public.The surveys offer a panoramic yet unflinchingly intimate view of how hospitals sometimes harm patients with medical mistakes, long-standing capacity issues, and organizational disarray. The IJB’s Robert Cribb explains how they did it.

DDoSecrets’ Lorax Horne has something cool to show you, they swear! You’ll just have to be patient…