Data Journalism – Katharina Brunner

Portfolio of some data journalism projects in which I participated:

Operation „Honigbiene“, (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019)

Anyone entering China by land must know what to expect: The border police raids the smartphone, then an app extracts a lot of private information. We received the code of the surveillance app and analysed the code.

Main story: Operation „Honigbiene“ (in English)
Methodology I: Wie die SZ die Ausspäh-App geknackt hat
Methodology II (Video): Wie die SZ die chinesische Polizei-App analysiert hat

The story was awarded with Journalistenpreis für Informatik Universität Saarland and got a „honorable mention“ from the researchnetwork surveillance-studies.org.

„Blaue Bücher, rosa Bücher“ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019)

Pirates for boys and fairies for girls? We investigated 50k German language children’s books and identified enduring stereotypes around gender. I was primarily working on a network analysis. Nominated for the Digital Humanities Award 2018.

Main story „Blaue Bücher, rosa Bücher“
Methodology: So sind wir an die Daten gekommen
A Twitter Thread about the investigation

“Wie hat Ihr Stimmkreis gewählt?” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018)

Writing by numbers: After an election there are two tasks for journalism. First, report the results instantly (which is easy) and second interpret the results (which is not that easy). We wanted to do these two things in an automated way and as fast as possible for all election districts in Bavaria and Hesse. The approach were auto-generated texts and visualisations based on the results of every single district in Bavaria and Hesse: Did a district vote extraordinarily? Similar to the national level? Just slightly different? The method for finding differences was the Jenks algorithm.

Article: Wie hat Ihr Stimmkreis gewählt?
Examples: München-Mitte vs. Regen, Freyung-Grafenau
Blogpost: Automatisierter Journalismus: Schreiben nach Zahlen

#analysis #datavis #textgeneration #datapipeline #rstats

Das gespaltene Parlament (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018)

Using text mining in political reporting. How does a right-wing, populist party change the atmosphere and the debates in the German parliament? Answers can be found in the official protocols of the Bundestag. The story was awarded with the Nannenpreis 2019.

Main story in German or in English
Data and Code can be found on Github.
Methodology: Das steckt in den Bundestagsprotokollen

#textmining #datamining #dataanalysis #datavis #rstats

“Wie wir über Umfragen berichten” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017)

Show more uncertainty to be more precise. Traditionally, media outlets are reporting about a new poll in the following style:

If an election would be held today, party x would get y percent of the votes. This is a decline of z percent compared to the previous week.

Covering polls like this is oversimplifying and even dangerous. Polls have real impact on decisions of politicians and voters, e.g. due to feedback loops. Pollsters want to mirror the views of a whole electorate by asking 1000 to 2000 people. Of course, there is uncertainty. The approach: Making the visualization more complex, but more precise by showing the uncertainty.

#datavis #rstats #statistics #pollingdata

Der Facebook-Faktor – Wie das soziale Netzwerk die Wahl beeinflusst (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017)

Getting an idea of the blackbox Facebook: Investigating the political sphere on Facebook by crawling the sites of political parties and active users. We evaluated more than one million public Facebook likes from a little less than 5000 politically interested Facebook users.

Awarded with the Acatech prize for Tech Journalism 2017.

#socialmedia #datavis #analysis #rstats