J298 Data Journalism

Students in this course will be introduced to the concept of data driven journalism with a strong focus on its use in investigative journalism. They will explore ways to obtain data, use tools to analyze it and learn how to deploy it in their work. They will be introduced to basic concepts in downloading data, making public record requests for electronic data, using optical character recognition scanning, and hand building data sets. They will learn a basic command of spreadsheets and will be introduced to database management software.

They will also, importantly, be taught to avoid the many pitfalls of data, a kind of statistical version of Defense Against the Dark Arts. They will learn how to clean data, question its reliability and use it meaningfully. If we are exceptionally ambitious, we will touch upon future areas of study, including the use of statistical analysis, APIs, web-scraping and computer coding.