Slides from presentation of research agenda around uses of GitHub in journalism at the Digital Methods Summer School 2015. More details here: http://lilianabounegru.org/2015/07/08/github-as-transparency-device-in-data-journalism-open-data-and-data-activism/

1. GitHub as Transparency Device in
Data Journalism, Open Data and Data Activism
Digital Methods Initiative Summer School 2015"
Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray & Stefania Milan

2. Part of a broader research collaboration:
!
• Data Journalism (Liliana Bounegru)
• Open Data (Jonathan Gray)
• Data Activism (Stefania Milan)
• Digital Methods (Richard Rogers & Erik Borra)

3. How is GitHub reconfiguring… data journalism?
open data?
data activism?

4. How is GitHub reconfiguring… data journalism?
open data?
data activism?

5. Our work on data journalism includes…

6. Witnessing and Auditing Journalism in
the Making with GitHub

7. 1. What is open data journalism and what does
GitHub have to do with it? (the advocates)
2. How has openness been studied as a political
concept? (the critics)
3. Research design: Mapping open data
journalism with GitHub (our project)

8. 1. What is open data journalism and what does
GitHub have to do with it? (the advocates)
2. How has openness been studied as a political
concept? (the critics)
3. Research design: Mapping open data
journalism with GitHub (our project)

9. An example of the role of GitHub
in open data journalism.

10. New York Times (2014) “War Gear Flows to Police Departments”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html

11. New York Times (2014) “Mapping the Spread of the Military’s Surplus Gear”"
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/us/surplus-military-equipment-map.html

12. New York Times (2014) “What Military Gear Your Local Police Department Bought”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/upshot/data-on-transfer-of-military-gear-to-police-departments.html

13. The Upshot on GitHub: https://github.com/TheUpshot/Military-Surplus-Gear

14. The Upshot on GitHub: https://github.com/TheUpshot/Military-Surplus-Gear

15. http://earino.shinyapps.io/Military-Surplus/

16. https://github.com/cinquemb/1033-program-quick-drill-down

17. Charleston Daily Mail (2014) “Federal programe sends military equipment to WV law enforcement”
http://www.charlestondailymail.com/article/20140819/DM01/140819135/1420

18. GitHub as a device for multiplying witnessing
around police acquisition of military equipment.

19. What does openness mean
in the context of journalism?

20. –Alex Howard, The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism
“The embrace of open source software and agile
development practices, coupled with a growing
open data movement, have breathed new life into
traditional computer-assisted reporting.”

21. Advocates discuss openness in terms of:
!
• Transparency
• Collaboration and participation

22. –Simon Rogers, “Hey Wonk Reporters, Liberate Your Data!”
“Data journalism only matters when it's transparent.”
”

23. –Mathew Ingram, “Open journalism also means opening up your data, so
others can use and improve it”
“Open journalism … means opening up your data,
so others can use and improve it.”

24. –Simon Rogers, “Journalist datastores: where can you find them? A list”
“It’s a pretty core tenet of open journalism that
you share your sources; i.e., you write a story about
data then you make numbers available to download ”

25. ––Simon Rogers, “Hey Wonk Reporters, Liberate Your Data!”
“Journalism today is at least as much about working
with the community as it is telling the world what
you think happened. The ethos of open journalism is
that reporting becomes better by gathering the
expertise of the world and helping to curate it.”
”

26. Openness in the service of what?

27. Advocates associated openness with:
!
• Trust, credibility and accountability
• Fact-checking and optimisation
(“many eyes make shallow bugs”)
• Innovation and reusability
• Democratising data and levelling the
playing field

28. – Nicolas Kayser-Bril in Scott Nesbitt’s
“Is open data living up to the hype? One data journalist weighs in”
“Open source makes an organization more
transparent and, therefore, more trustworthy.
Newsrooms are moving towards open source; just
look at the number of journalists using GitHub now!”

29. –Mathew Ingram, “Open journalism also means opening up your data, so
others can use and improve it”
“As with the code behind software programs —
the original use for things like GitHub — there are
a host of benefits to opening up the data that
provides the foundation for news stories,
including the fact that more eyeballs on the data
means a greater likelihood of finding errors
and/or misinterpretations of that data.”

30. –Alex Plough, “The Evolution of Data Journalism: from CAR to fivethirtyeight”
“ GitHub lets users duplicate others’ code and re-
purpose it for their own needs. This feature lets data
journalism teams across the world quickly replicate
each other’s projects, spurring innovation with
increasingly sophisticated news applications.”

31. –Alex Salkever, “Open Source Journalism: Data and the New News”
“Open source journalism levels the playing field.
Every neighborhood blogger in California or New
York or London can now post visualization using the
very same data that the biggest news organizations
in the world have use. And the blogger can focus
that data down on the local impact.”

32. What is the role of GitHub
in open data journalism?

33. –Alex Plough, “The Evolution of Data Journalism: from CAR to fivethirtyeight”
“Another trend is the use of software code-hosting
platform Github by news organizations. Typically
used by the open-source software development
community to store and share their code online (in
“repositories”), GitHub lets users duplicate others’
code and re-purpose it for their own needs.”

34. –Tom Giratikanon, Erin Kissane, Jeremy Singer-Vine,
“When the news calls for raw data”
“Why post it on GitHub? … As journalists
marshall more data than ever, collect it from a
wider range of sources, and analyze it in
increasingly complex ways, it’s important (and
interesting!) to be transparent about those
processes. I think about it in three ways:
verifiability …, reproducibility …, reusability.”

35. – Emily Ferber, “Getting GitHub: Why journalists should
know and use the social coding site”
“As more journalists embrace GitHub as a way
to improve stories, they’ll develop a new kind of
news community, centered around collaboration
and code – truly a news nerd’s nirvana.”

36. 1. What is open data journalism and what does
GitHub have to do with it? (the advocates)
2. How has openness been studied as a political
concept? (the critics)
3. Research design: Mapping open data
journalism with GitHub (our project)

37. 1. What is open data journalism and what does
GitHub have to do with it? (the advocates)
2. How has openness been studied as a political
concept? (the critics)"
3. Research design: Mapping open data
journalism with GitHub (our project)

38. To understand what is at stake we turn to
studies of openness and transparency in the
context of government and activism.

39. Some points raised by this research in relation to
studied openness or transparency programmes:
!
• Uncoupling of data and code from politics
• Witnessing data publics/subjects
• Presumption of absence of trust
• Anticipation of moral failings

40. Clare Birchall in “Data.gov-in-a-box” on Obama’s
data-driven transparency programme:
• “post-political solution”
• “data in lieu of politics”
• emphasis on individual rather than collective
political agency
• “only reveals that which is conducive of
maintaining the status-quo.”

41. –Clare Birchall, “‘Data.gov-in-a-box’: Delimiting transparency”
“The openness of all this data is obviously
meaningless until it is witnessed.”

42. –Clare Birchall, “‘Data.gov-in-a-box’: Delimiting transparency”
“What kind of publics, subjects, and indeed,
politics it [data-driven transparency model] will
produce?”

43. The “auditor–entrepreneurial–consumer
subjectivity”

44. –Clare Birchall, “‘Data.gov-in-a-box’: Delimiting transparency”
“The data subject is therefore called upon to
be auditor (to monitor the granular transactions
of the state in the name of accountability),
entrepreneur (to make data profitable through
apps and visualizations) and consumer (as the
market for such apps and visualizations).”

45. Clare Birchall, “Data.gov-in-a-box”:
• The burden of monitoring the state moves from
the state to the citizens.
• “A subject who is monitored while being asked to
monitor; acted upon as data while being asked to
act on data.”
• Agency is reliant on technological competence.

46. Because visibility is about gaining trust a
transparency device presumes that there is
an absence of trust in the first place.
(Harvey, Reeves & Ruppert, 2012)

47. –Penny Harvey, Madeleine Reeves & Evelyn Ruppert, “Anticipating failure”
“It is to past moral failures of wrongdoing,
conflict or corruption that these [transparency]
devices react and consequently it is the
anticipation of future moral failings towards
which they are then oriented.”

48. –Penny Harvey, Madeleine Reeves & Evelyn Ruppert, “Anticipating failure”
“As such rather than alleviating uncertainty
they come to amplify it.”

49. 1. What is open data journalism and what does
GitHub have to do with it? (the advocates)
2. How has openness been studied as a political
concept? (the critics)
3. Research design: Mapping open data
journalism with GitHub (our project)

50. 1. What is open data journalism and what does
GitHub have to do with it? (the advocates)
2. How has openness been studied as a political
concept? (the critics)
3. Research design: Mapping open data
journalism with GitHub (our project)

51. Questions.

52. How can we use these studies to make sense of
the move to make journalism more trustworthy
and accountable through the opening up of data
and code?

53. To be meaningful journalistic data and code
need to be witnessed.

54. What kinds of publics are mobilised around
open journalism data and code through GitHub?

55. What forms of trust and accountability are
produced by the opening up of data and code?

56. How does GitHub mobilise and format
engagement with journalism and with what effects?

57. Research design

58. How to map “open data journalism”
with GitHub?

59. GitHub not only as device for witnessing and
auditing journalism in the making

60. But also a source of data about such practises

64. Over 200 programmer-journalist GitHub accounts.
Over 60 journalism organisations GitHub accounts.

65. Five studies:
!
1. Situating GitHub in the journalism ecology
2. Mapping journalism data publics with
GitHub
3. Profiling journalism practises and product
repertoires through the “distant reading” of
code
4. Mapping open data on GitHub
5. Mapping data activism on GitHub

66. Five studies:
!
1. Situating GitHub in the journalism ecology"
2. Mapping journalism data publics with
GitHub"
3. Profiling journalism practises and product
repertoires through the “distant reading”
of code"
4. Mapping open data on GitHub
5. Mapping data activism on GitHub

67. 1. Situating GitHub in the journalism ecology
This study will locate GitHub in the data journalism space in terms of
its resonance. It will trace the issues associated with it, particularly
exemplary projects, programming languages, tools, analytical
techniques, visions and values.
!
The data journalism space will be demarcated through a three-year
collection of tweets containing related keywords and hashtags, as well
as through associated mailing lists and events.

68. 2. Mapping journalism data publics with GitHub
This study profiles the journalism publics, practises and product
repertoires active on GitHub. The focus is on functions, modes of
engagement, as well as trust and accountability mechanisms and how
they are mediated and reconfigured through GitHub, open code and
data.
!
To do so it uses custom-made GitHub scrapers to extract data around
users and repositories, and analyses such data manually and by means
of network analysis tools.

69. 3. Profiling journalism practises and product
repertoires through the “distant reading” of code
This study scopes out possibilities for using digital traces of code from
GitHub to inform a “distant reading” of the ideals and practises of
emergent data publics in journalism and civil society.
!
In addition to the tracing of actor networks and their modes of
engagement through the analysis of GitHub metadata in study 1, this
study enquires into the possibilities and methods for undertaking an
analysis of the actual code in the journalism repositories to examine the
epistemological commitments, horizons, styles of reasoning and action
repertoires of journalism data publics.

70. Same approach will be used to study
data activism and open data.

71. The Team
Facilitators:
• Liliana Bounegru (@bb_liliana / lilianabounegru.org)
• Jonathan Gray (@jwyg / jonathangray.org)
• Stefania Milan (@annliffey / stefaniamilan.net)
!
Programmer-analyst:
• Sam Leon (@noel_mas)

72. Who should join us?"
!
• Anyone active around or interested in data
journalism, data activism and/or open data.
• GitHub users or people familiar with the
platform.
• Designers and programmers.

73. Join Us!