Introduction

Summary

Abstract

An introduction to the book as a collective experiment in accounting for data journalism practices around the world, providing an overview of its sections and chapters and twelve challenges for critical data practice.

Keywords: data journalism, critical data practice, critical data studies, digital methods, science and technology studies, Internet studies

Data Journalism in Question

What is data journalism? What is it for? What might it do? What opportunities and limitations does it present? Who and what is involved in making it and making sense of it? This book is a collective experiment responding to these and other questions about the practices, cultures, politics and settings of data journalism around the world. It follows on from another edited book, The Data Journalism Handbook: How Journalists Can Use Data to Improve the News (Gray et al., 2012). Both books assemble a plurality of voices and perspectives to account for the evolving field of data journalism. The first edition started through a “book sprint” at Mozilla Festival in London in 2011, which brought together journalists, technologists, advocacy groups and others to write about how data journalism is done. As we wrote in the introduction, it aimed to “document the passion and enthusiasm, the vision and energy of a nascent movement,” to provide “stories behind the stories” and to let “different voices and views shine through” (Gray et al., 2012). The 2012 edition is now translated into over a dozen languages—including Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian—and is used for teaching at many leading universities and training centres around the world, as well as being a well-cited source for researchers studying the field.

While the 2012 book is still widely used (and this book is intended to complement rather than to replace it), a great deal has happened since 2012. On the one hand, data journalism has become more established. In 2011 data journalism as such was very much a field “in the making,” with only a handful of people using the term. It has subsequently become socialized and institutionalized through dedicated organizations, training courses, job posts, professional teams, awards, anthologies, journal articles, reports, tools, online communities, hashtags, conferences, networks, meetups, mailing lists and more.