UNCOVERED Conference 2024

When there's little data to be found about the topic you're investigating, we often turn to other methods to create it ourselves, by counting documents or patterns within them. Maybe these are police reports, medical records, emissions tracking, or school attendance rates. But how can you identify which documents exist and what you can do with them? This session will delve into methods to look for the many documents that exist around your reporting, ways to access them, and how to think about what you can create. The goal is to help you think deeper than the obvious data analysis, and into the journalistic analysis layer on top. We'll draw on examples from our reporting, including counting times legal judgments changed in a higher court while covering gender-based violence, identifying patterns from photos in the perpetration of human rights abuses, and how student dropout rates can reveal a lot more than a problem with their education.