The following post is from Esa Mäkinen, an open data advocate, a journalist at Helsingin Sanomat and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data.

Finnish novels used to be 200 pages long in the 1910s. A few hundred years later and the novels are longer: nowadays they are 300 pages on average. This was one of the findings of our recent HS Open event, a hack day for journalists, graphic designers and coders.

The event was organized by Helsingin Sanomat, Finlands leading daily newspaper, and the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) at Aalto University. SeCo provided the library metadata as a SPARQL end point, and Helsingin Sanomat provided the questions.

Now the HS Open core organising team and some other open data enthusiasts are heading towards DMY design festival in Berlin. We are showcasing our results in the festival and we have two workshops: on Friday and on Saturday.

During the workshops we will show people some of the basics of using open data in journalism:

  • gathering data
  • processing data
  • visualizing data

If you are in the vicinity, please come to say hello! You can find out more at:

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