GitHub as Transparency Device in Data Journalism, Open Data and Data Activism

At this year’s Digital Methods Summer School I am coordinating a research project on how journalists use GitHub, together with Jonathan Gray and Stefania Milan. This is part of a broader research collaboration with Erik Borra and Richard Rogers from the Digital Methods Initiative to expand the digital methods repertoire by developing tools and techniques for using code sharing platforms as sources of data for social, political and cultural research.

In the context of journalism GitHub has become an increasingly important platform in the data journalist’s toolkit. In spite of this, not much research has been done so far to understand how journalists use GitHub and how the platform is reconfiguring journalistic practises.

Below are the slides from the talk which introduced the project earlier in the week. Over the coming months I will be working to produce a research report on uses and users of GitHub in the context of journalism. In a second phase the study will be extended to examining the role of code sharing platforms such as GitHub in data activism and open data.

This project is part of a broader research agenda looking at how approaches from digital social research, at the confluence between Internet Studies, Actor-Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS), can be used to study journalism and news production in an age of big data.