A panel on Data Journalism, which is a splashy topic nowadays, was realized in Istanbul on the 24th of December, 2014 with great interest of the participants. Leyla Arsan, CEO of TAGES, made a speech about the open data and the European data journalism services during the panel.
Last month an attractive panel about “Data Journalism” within the Punto24 Journalism Workshops took place in Istanbul on Dec 24th, 2014. The panel was coordinated by Pinar Dag, founder of Dag Media and data journalism coach, and very important names came as guest speakers to the workshop. Leyla Arsan, the CEO of TAGES; Gulcin Yildirim, founder member of the Kadin Yazilimci (Women Developers) web-site (www.kadinyazilimci.com) and the database manager of Markafoni; Goksel Oral, the idea behind Data Journalism Platform project which is funded by TUBİTAK Teknogirisim fund; PhD-Cetin Yalcin Gulec – Erdem Eser Ekinci, developer of WebGraphBuilder and founding partner of Galaksiya; and Talha Oz, data scientist, were the guest speakers of the workshop. The main topic of the workshop was data journalism as well as the future of media and journalism.
After the opening speech by Pinar Dag, Leyla Arsan made a speech about the importance of open data. She pointed out many studies done about open data in USA and UK, and added that there are none in Turkey. However, she also stated that TAGES was working on a smart city project named RADICAL where launching a new service named “Object‐driven Data Journalism” for open data journalism. This service will enable citizens to share immediate data about the city they live in and/or the events they come across which then will be turned into meaningful data by journalists, this data will be open and can be used by journalists through the Object-driven Data Journalism APIs which are being developed by project partners right now. RADICAL Project (www.radical-eu.com) is a co-funded project by CIP ICT Policy Support Programme and it eases the fast creation of interoperable and socially‐aware services, by leveraging Internet of Things and Social Networking technologies, emerging from the results of four R&D EU‐funded projects. Besides Data Journalism, The RADICAL services belong to the areas of Cycling Safety, Green Products Management, Participatory Urbanism, Augmented Reality and Eco‐consciousness.
Leyla Arsan was also interviewed by Bilisim Dergisi (Informatics Magazine) about open data. You can read the interview from the following link: http://www.verigazeteciligi.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/110-119.pdf where she is talking about the CitySDK project (www.citysdk.eu) and the Digital Agenda Going Local for Turkey Report by Digital Turkey Platform (www.digitalgundemtr.com) as well as the lack of open data studies and app development using this data in Turkey against the abundance of these topics in other countries, especially developed countries, such as USA and UK. She also emphasizes the importance of commitment to the Open Government Partnership Agreement which Turkey also signed.
Goksel Oral talked about his Data Journalism Platform project in the workshop. The project will allow the readers to find the written texts, visuals and videos together with the social media data and the relevant information in a single page which’s real aim is to make data analysis easier.
Erdem Eser Ekinci, PhD and Cetin Yalcin Gulgec talked about the increasing rate of data creation in the last years and the presence of big data. They also added that this situation also results in a mean of data pollution and to gather meaningful data for journalism, men and programs should be working together.
Gulcin Yildirim mentioned that we are in the beginning of a new era in which everyone will know how to write codes and databases will grow in importance. She added that if the data can be managed in the right way, its obtainment and access will be easier and better.
Talha Oz did a through presentation about data mining, added another important point of data journalism is identifying the data and reading the graphics.
The news about the workshop can also be found from these links below:
http://www.platform24.org/nasil-yapmali/656/p24-ten-veri-gazeteciligi-atolyesi
http://www.verigazeteciligi.com/veri-gazeteciligi-nasil-yapiliyor-nasil-yapmali/
