Data Journalism

Overview

This course teaches some of the skills and techniques necessary for obtaining, analyzing and communicating structured information effectively. Students will scrutinize techniques used in previously published projects and will also analyze data on their own, primarily using Excel, HTML, CSS and Javascript (and JS libraries like D3), and, in some cases, command-line tools.

Most classes will begin with a short lecture and discussion about a topic, technique or published piece of journalism that used data journalism.

This will be a technical course, but the primary goal of the course is journalistic; we hope not to get too bogged down in the fiddly bits of the latest technologies. We'll try to demystify the technological side of things so you feel comfortable getting started and thinking programmatically. By the end of the course, you should be able to ask good questions of datasets, get answers from them, and communicate them effectively to a general audience.