Data Driven 2024

This is a “Bring Your Own Laptop” workshop

Limited to 20 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!

This is a “Bring Your Own Laptop” workshop.

Have you ever found yourself repeating the same dull task over and over? Noticing repetitive tasks can lead to tech solutions that make your research easier. Join Bellingcat’s Galen Reich and Giancarlo Fiorella to learn how open-source tools can tackle everyday problems and help you focus on your investigations.

Limited to 20 participants.

Kickstart your investigations with OCCRP Aleph, the leak taming, company registry matching, huge dataset wrangling tool that enables the Organized Crime Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to launch multiple cross border projects a year. Come learn about how to conduct advanced searches, cross-reference data across multiple leaks, and create your own investigation workspace — including building network diagrams and timelines. Make use of the billions of records that OCCRP Aleph hosts for your next investigation.

Interested in learning more about how First Nations communities across Canada are asserting sovereignty over their own data? In this hands-on presentation from FNIGC Knowledge Translation Officer Briana Linton, you will learn about how First Nations are collecting culturally competent data which is relevant to their lives, and how you can access this data to support your work.

Topics covered will include: a brief history of FNIGC’s nearly 30 years of groundbreaking First Nations survey work, an introduction to the free-to-use FNIGC Knowledge Lodge data tool, and a demonstration of FNIGC’s First Nations Data Centre.

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?

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.

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

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!)

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…