A departure from my usual articles about writing and marketing, I thought I’d share some data analysis with you this month. I wrote about using data to tell a story two years ago and had a great response so thought it was worth revisiting.

For those readers who have been following this newsletter for a number of years you will know I’m now in the third year of my PhD. This is the year when everything I’ve been doing over the past two years is starting to come together and I can see how my project will actually look (it’s about time!).

Where does data fit into journalism?

One thing the uni has been very keen for me to do is interact with my peers. This has a twofold effect in that it helps me build a network around my research interest, but also gets me to step outside my little study bubble and share what it is I’m working on with others. I now research in an office with four other PhD candidates, and last week I was asked to share my research methods with the digital technology special interest group I’m a member of. The data I’m sharing here is what I put together for the presentation.

Before I go too much further, I should refresh your memory on my research topic. I am looking at how journalists use social media texts to report on crisis events. To do this I am investigating three key crisis events from the UK – the London Bombings, UK Riots and Lee Rigby’s murder. These events span an eight-year period between 2005 and 2013, which gives me a chance to track longitudinal developments in journalist’s use of user-generated social media texts as a news source.

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