Launch Event: Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School is excited to present the launch event for Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data – a research project led by Tow Fellow Jonathan Stray.
Data journalism relies on deep principles from statistics, cognitive science, ethnography and more. But none of this is traditionally taught to journalists, and these ideas can be hard to learn because they seldom appear together in the same textbook! This report brings together many fields to explore where data comes from, how to analyze it, and how to communicate your results. It uses examples from journalism to explain everything from Bayesian statistics to the neurobiology of data visualization, all in plain language with lots of illustrations. Some of these ideas are thousands of years old, some were developed only a decade ago, and all of them have come together to create the 21st century practice of data journalism.