The use of R in data journalism

Schedule:
6.15 pm Doors open
6.30 pm Introduction / Welcome by the organizing team
6.40 pm Talks by Marie-José Kolly, NZZ and Patrick Meier, Tamedia
(see below)

7.40 pm Are you hiring? Looking for an R related job? ... or organising an interesting event? Take the stage for one minute. (DM us if you need a slot!)
~ 8.00 pm Apéro & Beer (Sponsored by NZZ)

*********
Marie-José Kolly
Datajournalist at NZZ
https://www.nzz.ch/impressum/marie-jose-kolly-mjk-ld.1360967
@mjKolly

On weapons and dialects: The initial hypothesis and the final story

Datajournalists at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung use R (as well as Python and further tools) to process data and to test hypotheses. And, thereby, to find stories in data. We will talk about two of our recent stories and the process behind them. What they have in common: the results of our analysis surprised us. In case 1, we had no specific anticipation as to the outcome of the analysis – but the data made a very clear point. In case 2, we were expecting very specific effects but could not confirm them – and therefore created a very different article than what we had initially planned.

***
Patrick Meier
Data Scientist at Tamedia

Tamedia is a leading Swiss media company publishing newspapers such as “Tagesanzeiger” or “Sonntagszeitung”. It has a dedicated Team that uses R (among many other tools) in data-driven journalism. Two examples will be shown which led to publications in the “Sonntagszeitung”:

• Web-Scraping and text analysis: Gender representation in 120’000 rulings of the Swiss Federal Court

• The use of freely available data to calculate and visualize fire brigade response times in Zürich and 5 other major Swiss cities