Data Journalism. Work session (VII)

The opening up of public data and its exploitation feeds a collaboration-based fabric that encompasses many professional sectors. We all have access to data and we can work with it, show it, or reuse it, but who guarantees its quality and authenticity? The document and archive management sector has an important input to make in this area, as it contributes criteria considering authenticity an essential property for assessing the trustworthiness of the documents and data we use.

 5 p.m. // “Data Archiving: the Case of the Terrassa Historical Archive”, with Joan Soler

Data archiving has to allow a change in the classical view of archives and open them up to the general public more than ever before. The new paradigm of archives includes understanding them as pools for the distribution of released, historical data with a context and above all that is useful for everyone. Datafication, at the same time, has become the final frontier that archives need to overcome: it is necessary to offer data in exploitable formats and offer tools that facilitate data selection. This is the philosophy applied at the Terrassa Historical Archive (AHT) and at other institutions. Joan Soler will explain how they work at the AHT, what data archiving involves, and what it can offer.

5.45 p.m. // Break

6 p.m. //  Workshop: “Learn to Visualise Twitter and Facebook Data Using Gephi”, with Natalia Mazzote

Gephi is an open-code programme that allows you to visualize and consult graphs. It can be used in sectors as varied as politics, health, social networks, etc. Media such as The New York Times use it to visualise the global connectivity of their contents and Twitter uses it to examine network traffic around determined events. The truth is that Gephi offers the possibility of managing thousands of nodes and of working while carrying out large-scale analysis. This workshop aims to introduce us to Gephi as users, based on data from the two most widely-used social networks: Facebook and Twitter, while explaining basic graph theory concepts such as hubs, nodes and types of networks. To follow the workshop it is necessary to have Gephi installed on your computer. To download it please go to: http://gephi.github.io/users/download/