Thursday 15 March 2012

Comment: We're surrounded by data, but is it a new field or just a trend?

Whether we like it or loathe it, data is all round us. We are increasingly leading our lives in a binary context with infinite data-sets flowing around us and code-lines designing our lifestyles, so why is it that data journalism is still regarded as a new field?

This was especially underlined with the launch ofthe latest Data Journalism Awards at the end of January. "We often see this sort of journalism awarded in very different categories, and we felt the domain of data journalism is yet to be recognised properly as a standalone discipline," said the Deputy Director for the Global Editors Network, Antoine Laurent.

"We're still only seeing the beginning of this,” added the Director of the European Journalism Centre, Wilfried Rutten “but data journalism is going to be very big. People used to ask me, 'what is this crazy stuff you are working on?', but with the support of Global Editors Network and Google they can't ask that anymore."

The Guardian made quite a big, yet factual based, claim that their data journalism practices date back to the 19th century. Indeed their example is impressive, but it also makes me wonder whether we’re putting too much weight on data journalism today.

As with all industries journalism has segmented heavily in the past century, but if you really think about it haven’t reporters always been required to make sense of figures and base their stories on them? How is this different then? Can we straightforwardly define data journalism and, if so, would we just end up with more new fields (finding data, crunching data, visualizing data, etc.)?

I’d like to start this blog by asking if data journalism is a new field. The poll will be up for a week at the end of which I’ll check the results. Please be sociable and vote or leave a comment below :-)