Hacks and hackers unite to get solid stories from difficult data

JOURNALISTS, DESIGNERS and programmers combined their skills to free up data inaccessibly stored online at the first Hacks and Hackers Hack Day in Dublin on Tuesday.

“Journalists know how to interpret data but they are not always good at finding it, especially when it’s buried in databases and spreadsheets,” said Gerard Cunningham, a freelance journalist and an organiser of the event.

“You’re marrying two sets of skills – the hacker who knows how to get the data and the journalist who can look at it and know how to interpret it. Between the two you get better stories, better told.”

Projects on the day included following the money on the eTenders public procurement website, mapping archaeological monuments and overlaying them with council planning data, charting Environmental Protection Agency licence applications with enforcement orders and comparing speed camera zones with death rates.

Áine McGuire of Scraperwiki, a manager of the event, said the archaeological monuments project, named MonuMENTAL, had built a website and visualisations in order that their work be carried on.

Scraperwiki – focused on combining database scraping tools and information datasets – is on a tour of Britain and Ireland with its Hacks and Hackers event.

The Dublin leg, part of Innovation Dublin, was sponsored by Guardian Open Platform and the National Union of Journalists Dublin freelance branch. Fingal County Council used the day to launch its open data portal at data.fingal.ie.

“It makes sense for journalists to work side by side with software developers,” Ms McGuire said. “Together they’ll have a much, much greater opportunity to dig out the data and mine it easily.

She warned however that it was a “two-way street” and that the data sometimes shows there is no story.

Gavin Sheridan of thestory.ie, a website aimed at promoting transparency by releasing public documents and data, said: “For the first event of its kind in Ireland, I think it was successful in demonstrating what is possible. It’s kind of a first step.

“When you combine that with Fingal opening some of its data, you can see the possibilities of how journalists can use data in more significant ways and how government can be more proactive in publishing data in structured opened formats. It’s a very tentative basic first step, but there has to be a much bigger approach taken.”