Apply for Data Institute 2024 – United States

The Data Institute is a collaboration between the Center for Journalism & Democracy and the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting.

The Data Institute is a free, hands-on workshop that will teach you how to work with data as a journalist, how to apply design principles and layout to charts or stories, and how to code your own interactive project. In addition to training sessions on data journalism, design and programming that are taught by experienced journalists, participants will also meet and talk to leading journalists about their careers.

Co-founded in 2015 by two women and journalists of color, Sisi Wei and Lena Groeger, the Data Institute seeks to address an equity gap and make high-quality training more accessible for all journalists who want to tell powerful stories. The Data Institute equips journalists from a broad array of social, ethnic and economic backgrounds with the technical skills to create and lead data journalism, including but not limited to people of color, women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities.

Benefits

• The Data Institute is completely free to attend. They will cover roundtrip travel costs to Washington, D.C., and provide lodging on the campus at Howard University. They’ll also provide lunch and snacks every day of the Institute.
• In addition, every participant will receive a $1,000 stipend to supplement other needs or replace lost income while participating in the program.

What you’ll learn?

• Over two weeks, they’ll cover the basics of using data, design and code for journalism. By the end of the course you should be able to:
  • Data Journalism
    • Conduct data research and evaluate the reliability of your data.
    • Clean data and analyze data sets for interesting trends and outliers.
    • Bulletproof data against common pitfalls and inconsistencies.
    • Perform the most commonly used statistical techniques in journalism.
  • Design
    • Sketch and prototype multiple designs for a single project and evaluate the best approach.
    • Learn how to use color, typography and layout.
    • Create clear and clean visualizations to help readers understand complex information.
  • Programming
    • Understand basic programming concepts.
    • Create your own website from scratch, using HTML/CSS and Javascript.
    • Understand how you might use AI in different ways to help your work as a journalist.
    • Know how to continue learning on your own.
    • The workshop will be hands-on and participants will be working through exercises throughout the workshop.

Eligibility Criteria

• If you’re a journalist passionate about learning how to use data, design and code to help tell stories, this workshop is for you. You don’t need to have any previous experience, but they want to see that you’ve demonstrated curiosity about telling stories with data.
• The Data Institute’s home is the Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard University, and they’re especially excited to welcome applicants from HBCUs—alumni, professors, and current students. In addition, they strongly encourage applications from members of tribal nations, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, the Asian and Pacific Islander communities, and other groups historically left out of opportunities such as these.
• If you’ve ever felt intimidated by learning to code and doing math, don’t count yourself out, because they’ve all been there. Most of the teachers you’ll have at the Data Institute majored in the humanities, such as journalism, English, history or philosophy.
• All workshop students will need to use their own laptop, which must be able to install software like R Studio. This means that Chromebooks and iPads won’t work. They’ll provide other materials, including links to where you can get the software they’ll be using for free.

For more information, visit Center for Journalism & Democracy.