Classes

Introduction to data journalism (3 weeks)

Understanding the basics of good reporting, structure, and storytelling
The evolution of data journalism. From computer-assisted reporting to integrating social science methods
Types of data journalism projects that exist today
The different kinds of roles on a newsroom data or investigative team
Introduction to tools for analyzing data and creating visualizations
How to tell good stories, written or visual

Introduction to data analysis tool R
What data is and is not, how data is most effectively structured
Gathering and visualizing original data
Open data— Where and from whom
How to acquire data from the government by using the Freedom of information law, and what the government is and is not required to disclose
Determining whether a data source is reliable and cleaning data so that it’s usable
Dealing with difficult sources and difficult data
Cleaning and preparing data for further analysis
Telling stories with maps
Joining and summarizing data sets for deeper insight

Class 8

Methods for exploring data visually
Other methods of acquiring data, e.g. scraping, APIs, crowdsourcing, polling, surveys
Treating data as a source. Interviewing data by making a hypotheses and testing intuitions against data
Newsworthiness, ethics, and the difference between a dataset and a story
Process of pitching and storyboarding stories in a newsroom

Class 13

Forms that data stories come in, like text features, news apps, data visualization
Fundamental concepts of data visualization, identifying the appropriate type of visualization for a dataset, creating accurate and easily readable charts
Mining text as a method for data analysis and stories
Creating interactive data visualizations with HTML, CSS, and D3 Plus
The 2016 presidential elections, or the trouble with statistics and expressing concepts of probability