Last week the University of Miami organised what might have been the first event dedicated to building bridges between digital humanities and data journalism. There were a lot of great talks. Scott Klein spoke about the culture clash between programmer-journalists and traditional journalists and several digital humanities scholars presented their work, from Geoff McGhee, to Ben Schmidt and Lauren Klein. I’d particularly recommend having a look at Lauren’s work on the cultural and critical dimensions of data visualisation and on feminist data visualisation.
Jonathan Gray and I have been working in both data journalism and digital sociology for a few years so we spoke about what we learned about different genres data work in data journalism and digital research, including digital methods, computational social science, cultural analytics, computer-assisted reporting, programmer-journalism and computational journalism. We also provided some reflections on how we might be able to design collaborations between them, including around shaping what big data becomes and developing methods to archive data projects. We also made the case for the data sprint as a format in which we might be able to co-produce objects that can simultaneously inhabit the worlds of data journalism, digital humanities and digital sociology.
We are planning to write a short paper on this topic in the coming months. In the meantime here are the slides from our talk: