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. We’d all recognised that there was a gap in the conference offering in Europe, with nothing really giving us a mix of academia and industry as you find in some of the stateside conferences. We decided that perhaps we could do something about that. We quickly found an excellent mix of keynote speakers, and our call for papers attracted a nice mix of academic and industrial talks, allowing us to put together a varied programme that was interesting to a range of people. We had over 100 attendees to the conference, coming from both industry and academia, which led to a productive two days of discussions, with the first day of talks followed by a day of workshops and an unconference.
We very much enjoyed it, and will be running the next edition in Cardiff in June 2018!