DIGITAL RESEARCH TOOLS
for Investigative Reporters / 9.12.2014 / #icfjdigital
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Intro Friedrich Lindenberg (@pudo)
Knight International Journalism
Fellow
Technologist with Code for Africa,
ANCIR
Building tools for investigative
reporters
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Agenda
Digital Research Tools
Why does it matter?
Some examples
What is still missing?
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A word on
computer
literacy
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What tools? Investigate people and companies
Search for data on specific topics
Sift through sets of documents
Understand data in tables
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Ukraine in
February
A team of investigative reporters
discover Victor Yanukovych’s
personal documents (in his lake)
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How can we… … digitise the documents?
… share and search?
… let readers tag documents?
… find mentions of people,
companies, dates, money?
… see how companies and people
relate?
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#1 : DocumentCloud and Overview
Manage, share, search and explore large sets of documents
http://documentcloud.org | http://overviewproject.org
http://sourceafrica.net
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–An investigative reporter
“We're working with 40 GB of XXX and
would like to search within the
documents for certain keywords (like
XXX) so we can identify XXX. Ideally we
should be able to tag the docs..”
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#2 : OpenCorporates and DueDil
Finding information on registered companies and their
directors.
http://opencorporates.com | http://duedil.com
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#3 : Investigative Dashboard
Request company information from commercial databases and
conduct on-the-ground research.
https://investigativedashboard.org/
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#4 : Tabula
Get data out of PDF files.
http://tabula.technology/
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Why should I
use these tools?
find better information
access obscured data
recognize patterns
… and how? pick one, make it your own
http://bit.ly/icfjdigital
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Agenda
Manage evidence for your story
Build an investigative memory
Merge data from many places
Alerts for a person or company