The Data Journalism Handbook at #MozFest 2011 in London

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

With the Mozilla Festival approaching fast, we’re getting really excited about getting stuck into drafting the Data Journalism Handbook, in a series of sessions run by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Journalism Centre.

As we blogged about last month, a group of leading data journalists, developers and others are meeting to kickstart work on the handbook, which will aim to get aspiring data journalists started with everything from finding and requesting data they need, using off the shelf tools for data analysis and visualisation, how to hunt for stories in big databases, how to use data to augment stories, and plenty more.

We’ve got a stellar line up of contributors confirmed, including:

James Ball, Guardian Datablog
David Banisar, Article 19
Caelainn Barr, EU Data Journalist
Paul Bradshaw, City University London
Nicolas Kayser-Bril, Data Journalist
Heather Brooke, Journalist and FOI Campaigner
Lisa Evans, Guardian Datablog
Rich Gordon, Northwestern University
Francis Irving, ScraperWiki
Friedrich Lindenberg, Open Knowledge Foundation
Cynthia O’Murchu, Financial Times
Aron Pilhofer, New York Times
Anthony Reuben, BBC News
Simon Rogers, Guardian Datablog
Sascha Venohr, Zeit Online
Lulu Pinney, Infographic designer

Here’s a sneak preview of our draft table of contents:

Introduction
- What is data journalism?
- Why is it important?
- How is it done?
- Examples, case studies and interviews
  - Data powered stories
  - Data served with stories
  - Data driven applications
- Making the case for data journalism
  - Measuring impact
  - Sustainability and business models
- The purpose of this book
- Add to this book
- Share this book
Getting data
- Where does data live?
  - Open data portals
  - Social data services
  - Research data
- Asking for data
  - Freedom of Information laws
  - Helpful public servants
  - Open data initiatives
- Getting your own data
  - Scraping data
  - Crowdsourcing data
  - Forms, spreadsheets and maps
Understanding data
- Data literacy
- Working with data
- Tools for analysing data
- Putting data into context
- Annotating data
Delivering data
- Knowing the law
- Publishing data
- Visualising data
- Data driven applications
- From datasets to stories
Appendix
- Further resources

If you’re interested in contributing you can either:

Come and find us at the Mozilla Festival in London this weekend!
Contribute material virtually! You can pitch in your ideas via the public data-driven-journalism mailing list, via the #ddj hashtag on Twitter, or by sending an email to .

We hope to see you there!

Jonathan Gray

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Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.