This month we find ourselves digging up data with the help of APIs. While there are oodles of APIs for different things (there’s a Star Wars API and an ISS API and many many others), I wondered which endpoints might be interesting for journalists. So here is a list of some of them — we’ll […]
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Tim Harford’s lethal bathtub
Tim Harford’s books are on the reading list for journalism students at Jomec and we are big fans of More or Less. And this month he supplied us all with a great case of numbers going wrong, in a piece for the Financial Times. You can listen to him explaining it on Radio 4’s The […]
Our course after 6 months of Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic shut down our schools at the end of March and sent staff and students alike home to work on their laptops. This meant MSc students finished their group projects using online platforms and started dissertation projects while trying to get back to their home countries, or while stuck in Cardiff. Although the […]
The Clwstwr news projects — update
Clwstwr is a five-year programme in south Wales — run from Cardiff — that was started to encourage the development of original screen-related projects. ‘Screen’ here means anything that touches on creative or technological industries in a broad sense. Since it was set up in early 2019, it has allocated funding and development support to […]
Journalism by Numbers — this year’s [Virtual] Summer School
With Cardiff University buildings closed since March because of the Coronavirus pandemic, the Summer School for the public moved online in June, and included a one-hour session on what datajournalists do. The Summer School comprised a week of workshops that ranged from radiography and earth sciences to building design and writing for business. In our […]
Capturing OSINT flags with Cardiff’s Cybersoc
Cardiff University’s Cyber Society gave us all its Capture the Flag challenge earlier this year and now has over a thousand players on its leaderboard, many of them sitting on the maximum score 0f 15,000. The challenges are organised into three streams: ten introductory questions to get you warmed up, 18 tasks for online intelligence […]
SELECT * FROM a day of SQL…
This month our students survived a full-day workshop on SQL, moving from the very basics of the syntax to querying datasets or working through some of the better tutorials. First up was the excellent Select Star tutorial by Zi Chong Kao, which is based on a dataset of US prisoners executed since 1976. We then […]
NHS Hack Day returns to Cardiff
At the end of semester two our 2019 students set off (armed with a full semester of javascript) for the Cardiff NHS Hack Day. This regular event moves around the UK and brings together health specialists, technologists and anyone at all who’s got a suggestion about improving any aspect of healthcare. There’s an overview of […]
Election data — the UK’s December vote
Elections are a special meeting of journalism and data. They generate lots of both! So the morning after the long night of vote counting, we got this year’s students working on the results for a full day. Four student groups were each given one of the four UK nations. Each group also got a Welsh […]
DataJConf 2017
We’ve recently returned from a trip to Dublin for DataJConf 2017 – the first European Conference on Data and Computational Journalism. Our course directors, Glyn and Martin were co-organisers of the conference, along with Bahareh Heravi of UCD. We first started talking to Bahareh about organising the conference sometime at the beginning of the year. […]