Although I do less of this these days, I have also worked on the ‘data and analysis’ side of longer investigative journalism projects. I can code, lol. You can see examples here.
I studied maths and physics at The University of Manchester. That’s where I first started programming (and why I have strong opinions on technology...).
- An investigation into Irish politicians who recorded their attendance in the main government building for expenses purposes on days when they did not attend any of the votes held there. I pitched this idea while on a Google News Initiative Fellowship. I wrote a scraper in R to collect data on voting records and combined this with publicly available attendance records to make a database that showed who had missed votes when they had recorded themselves as onsite.
- Similar to the above investigation but for members of the Seanad rather than the Dáil.
- An investigation into Dublin’s housing crisis. I worked as a researcher on this programme, making databases of figures for housing availability and planning permission requests in different areas. Some of this information was scraped from online reports using R and some gathered from FOI requests.
- An investigation into how the traveller community is treated by different council districts in Ireland. Again I worked as a researcher on this programme pulling together data from FOI requests.
- The Syllabus. This is a cool project that aggregates interesting articles, papers and lecture videos from across the internet. I did some work in the early stages of this, writing scripts to pull data from YouTube videos and similar.