Module Three: Secure data assignment
1 List what you can do at each of these stages to work safely with any data
- Where did we get it? (keep a record)
- What can we do with it? (licence / T&C)
- Is it any good? (data quality / footnotes / extreme numbers)
- Where are we keeping it? (and why?)
- Will we publish a dataset from it? (and why?)
- Any other steps
2 Review one or more of these cases of (primary) data gathered for journalism. The first two involve donated data, the third involves monitoring and the last collected the data from an NHS search function.
You don’t have to provide evidence that you’ve looked at one or more of these stories (although you can if it’s useful or helps you to review them). The goal here is to see some concrete examples of how journalists have collected data (some of it personal data) for a story.
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Deliveroo drivers earn as little as £2 an hour (TBIJ) & background
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Patients ‘glued own teeth’ as dentists drop NHS work (BBC) & background
3 Having reviewed these stories, identify a possible source of data that you could collect. Decide if the collection would be legally and ethically safe - why (not)? The goal is not to find the ideal data collection project, but simply to test a hypothetical data collection idea: you might simply identify a possible collection project and explain why it won’t work.
Send your material to Cambridge Spark, since they are tracking who’s done what.
What should my finished document look like? It should not run very long and there is no minimum word count: Question 1 is around half a dozen points or sentences. Question 2 doesn’t require you to write anything (although you can submit your observations if you like). Question 3 is an outline of what your idea is and why it works / doesn’t work so it could be two paragraphs or it could be a series of points.
The whole thing could conceivably be done in a single page, but there is no upper limit if you need to write more.