Food prices are rising steep; unemployment in the EU is going up, Sub-Sahara developing countries are doing well in ICT development. How do you check these statements, or find the data to sustain these statements? If you use Google keyword search je will miss 80% of the fun. Google indexes not more than 20% of the information on the web. The other 80% is stored in databases, hidden behind the front door of the portal of international organizations.
This workshop aims at exploring the journalistic use of databases of international organizations. This course does not give an overview of all international databases. It is just a sample to show how important these data are for research and reporting. We start with the database of the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics, which uses a new interface. Next we explore economic databases of the EU. We will compare these findings with results from queries of the OECD databases. Food prices will be checked at the database of the FAO and development issues are discussed on findings at databases of UNDP.
How to import these data in an excel spreadsheet and clean the data matrix preparing for calculations, is the second topic of this course.
In this hands-on course we will use published stories from international newspapers and magazines like Financial Times and the Economist, and will try to find the data and databases behind these stories.
Trainer: Peter Verweij
When? Friday November 21st, 3.45 PM
Where? Erasmushogeschool, Room 1.10
