Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/investigative-dashboard/)
OCCRP Data, part of the Investigative Dashboard, offers journalists a shortcut to the deep web. It now has over 170 public sources and more than 100 million leads for public search – news archives, court documents, leaks and grey literature encompassing UK parliamentary inquiries, companies and procurement databases, NGO reports and even CIA rendition flights, among other choice reading.
When it comes to doing investigations using online tools, there is no one tool that will answer all of your questions. Instead you’ll most likely need to build slowly towards the answer using a jumble of jigsaw pieces — a name here, a connection there. The good news is that there are dozens of tools that can be used to find the pieces to your puzzle. GIJN’s Alastair Otter has pulled together tools that can be used to help build a profile of someone — or their business.
How can online research tools aid the work of investigative reporters and others looking into transnational financial flows, corporate structures and other illicit activities of organized crime and global business? Google and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) brought together a small group of investigative journalists and technologists from around the world to examine the answers to this question at their first Investigathon in London last month.
Investigative journalists and other citizens interested in uncovering the organised crime and corruption that affect the lives of billions of people worldwide gain, with each passing day, unprecedented access to information. Huge volumes of information are being made available online by governments and other organisations, and it seems that the much-needed information is in everyone’s grasp. However, corrupt officials in governments and organised crime groups are doing their best to conceal information and to hide their wrongdoings.
Participants at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference last week got a preview of the newly redesigned Investigative Dashboard, a research tool to help journalists get access to business records around the world. Developed by GIJN member Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, this week OCCRP formally launched ID at the Conflict in a Connected World conference sponsored by Google Ideas, which has supported development of the new tool.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from December 3 to 9 finds @BuzzFeedNews mapping wildfire prone areas across America, @dwnews dissecting the value of insurance against climate change, the release of @infobeautyaward winners, and @jschwabish teaching fourth grade kids the wonders of data visualization in fun and inventive ways.
It’s been a great year for data journalism and visualizations. GIJN’s Top 10 #ddj series captured snapshots of what’s popular on Twitter among the global data journalism community for 46 weeks in 2018. For this edition, we asked NodeXL to map 2018’s most popular #ddj tweets from January 1 to December 11 and the results are in. This year’s most popular tweets include @FinancialTimes’ ever-popular Visual Vocabulary chart, @Google’s Dataset Search, @hnrklndbrg’s eclectic visualizations, and @SZ’s analysis of Germany’s parliamentarians using laughter as a debate weapon.
In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all others. To those who see it, it presents the entire universe at once — an investigative reporter’s dream. Over the past six months, I’ve been working for OCCRP to produce a tool named after this mythical object. It’s based on a prototype I hacked up as part of my 2014 Knight International Journalism Fellowship, and it has now grown into a data research tool as part of the Investigative Dashboard.
Journalism is by definition investigative. However, the depth and scope of possibilities to unearth and bring to light wrongdoings of public interest has increased manifold, thanks to the way the Internet has been evolving in the last decade. To be a true investigative reporter today, it is indispensable to fine-tune the old philosophy with three new practices: be Open, Systematic and Safe.