Cross-border data journalism

Jacopo Ottaviani – @JacopoOttaviani

www.TheMigrantsFiles.com

1st investigation (2014): "Counting the dead"

2nd investigation (2015): "The money trail"

Key methodological aspects

• Trans-national team of data journalists (10+ European countries)
• Media coalition aimed to co-publication
• Centralised project management
• Distributed tasks
• Share the data, but decentralise production
• Shared data visualisations and technical costs

Key sources for "Counting the dead"

• Three data sources merged
  1. Fortress Europe by Gabriele del Grande
  2. United for Intercultural Action network of NGOs
  3. Puls, a project run by the University of Helsinki

themigrantsfiles.com

All data and methodology here:

Generation E

The voice of South-European youth migration

Giolika Poulopoulou, 25 years, from Thessaloniki in Greece to Berlin, theatre pedagogy

Why E?

• Europe
• Expatriate
• Emigration
• Exodus
• Erasmus

• Exile
• Escape
• Easyjet
• E-mail
• ...

Objectives

Dive into the generation of young south-european migrants

• Connect data to stories (and viceversa)
• Show limits & lacks of existing data
• Approach the topic from a pan-european angle
• Publish stories in multiple languages, raise awareness and shape public debate in Europe
• Fight clichés across Europe
• Gather a critical mass of users for future developments of the project

Brain drain

vs. 

Mobility

Generation E, in numbers

• 3 main tracks
• 4 data journalists
  • Sara Moreira (@saritamoreira, Portugal)
  • Daniele Grasso (@danielegrasso, Spain)
  • Katerina Stavroula (@i_catrin, Greece)
  • Jacopo Ottaviani (@jacopoOttaviani, project manager, Italy)
• 6 languages
• 10+ media outlets
• Several countries involved (origins/destination)

Three main tracks

1. Crowdsourcing stories from young migrants
2. Interviews of policy-makers, researchers and associations
3. Data investigation (for each country)

1st launch: 8.9.2014

• Multilingual crowdsourcing campaign
• Handmade front-end design (to be embedded in newspapers): www.generatione.eu
• Existing data on migration flows
• Results: 1,200 stories in one Excel file
• Preparing the ground for 2nd launch

2nd launch: 24.11.2014

• Major findings based on collected data
• Interviews to researchers and stakeholders 
• Fragments of stories
• Re-launch the form 
• 8 interviews in German of migrants living in Germany

Major finding #1 - Driving factors

Major finding #2 - Registration

Major finding #3 - Inclination to return

2,600 stories received

Projects like this do not finish once published.

They begin once published.

List of Generation E Publications

http://www.generatione.eu

Limits & Potentials

• The sample is not representative of the population
• Methodology used to build the dataset is not rigorously scientific
• Still useful to tell stories and find interesting insights
• Gold mine of narratives and stories and an evidence of official data's lacks

Tools used

• OpenRefine to clean data (e.g., eliminate duplicates)
• Datawrapper to make charts
• Trello to coordinate team, calendar, tasks and share files
• Google Forms to collect stories (+ custom CSS)
• Google Drive to share files
• Doodle to schedule calls (1 call per month)

Future directions

• "Explode" the project in more destination countries 
• Involve new countries of origins
• Publish more stories of migrants ("give numbers a face")
• Go multimedia, explore new narratives and new formats
• Experiment some Natural Language Processing on the stories dataset
• Have fun offline (events, exhibitions, etc.)

What Portuguese young migrants miss the most?

courtesy of Sara Moreira

Thank you!

Questions?

@JacopoOttaviani