Monthly Archives: January 2018

Building the first central database of victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime

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Bombings in Barcelona in 1938

Bombings in Barcelona in 1938 (Image by Italian Airforce under CC)

In a guest post for OJB, Carla Pedret looks at a new data journalism project to catalogue what happened during the Spanish Civil War.

125,000 people died, disappeared or were repressed in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and during the Franco dictatorship, according to historians. Many of their families still do not know, 40 years later, what exactly happened to them.

Now the Innovation and Human Rights (IHR) association has created the first central database of casualties, missing persons and reprisals during the Spanish Civil War and under Francoism.

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Now available under Creative Commons: my book chapter on data journalism

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Finding, interrogating, visualising, mashing

The data journalism continuum from the first edition of the Online Journalism Handbook

When I agreed to write the second edition of the Online Journalism Handbook, I asked that the chapter on data journalism from the 2011 edition of the book be released under a Creative Commons licence. To Routledge’s credit, they agreed. Here, then, I’m making that book chapter available — you can download it from here or access it on Slideshare (embedded below).

It’s always difficult to get publishers to agree to things like this, so if you have any comments or feedback that I can use to make a similar case to publishers in future, please let me know in the comments.

The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons Licence

FAQ: How the use of UGC and verification has changed in journalism

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The latest in my series of FAQ posts comes from a current MA Online Journalism student, who is writing an article for a German publication.

How has the use of user-generated content from social media changed over the last years in the UK?

The use of UGC from social media has changed enormously in the UK in the last decade. Obviously many of the platforms didn’t even exist a decade ago, so we’ve moved from quoting emails to taking screenshots, to a situation now where it’s common to embed live social media content which users can interact with from the article itself – whether that’s to share, like, follow, or respond. Continue reading →