Week 7 – May 1 – May 8, 2016
This week was a busy week, especially because of the hackathon that Correctiv just hosted and the conference that I headed to this week in Madrid. After the event on Saturday, I was a bit tired, but wanted to enjoy the weekend, especially because May 1 in Berlin is a big event!
May 1 is International Labour Day, so I met up with some friends to grab lunch and go to the festival in Kreuzberg. The festival was similar to other street-fair festivals with food carts and vendors. While I was at the festival, I watched some people wear headphones and follow the lead of someone who was telling them exactly what to do. It was kind of weird, but also fascinating to see how people did exactly as the guy told them to do. After hanging out at the festival for a bit, I headed to dinner with Erika & Annabel (former fellow who lives in Berlin) and Finn. We had an amazing dinner at this place called Go Bento, where the chef prepared our food based on our food preferences and then brought out more food if we were still hungry.
Monday early morning I got news from the Education Writers Association that the project that I worked on with the Huffington Post while at the Chronicle, won the first prize award for data journalism!
That was a nice way to start the week! On Monday, Erika also joined our usual editorial meeting (it was in English this week which was nice) and I gave a website critique of the Correctiv site on things that I might change or find confusing. It was really nice to have Erika in the office to see what I’m working on and to catch up about things that I can do to make my fellowship go smoothly.
In the evening, I chatted with the other fellows on our monthly fellows catch up call and headed to the Axel Springer young journalist awards dinner, since a colleague of mine at Correctiv won an award. The event was on the 38th floor of the Axel Springer building, so we had an awesome view of the whole city from the dinner area. The event was different from journalism awards dinners that I’ve attended previously, as each person who won an award got to have a booth at the space to show off their work and talk more about it. One of the prize winners also declined her award because she felt that she couldn’t accept it and then gave a long speech on why she wasn’t taking the award. That was also interesting to see (granted, I only understood a little since I didn’t have translation the whole time!) There was also a room in the space that was a bar area, but smoking was allowed. Although it shouldn’t surprise me (because smoking in public places inside is pretty common here), it still amazed me how many people smoked in this room. Overall, I’m really happy that I got the chance to attend the event and see how many people are interested in the work that Correctiv is doing.
Here’s a few pictures from the past few days:
On Tuesday, I met with Erika for an amazing breakfast at this place near my house to catch up and then headed to work to continue analyzing nursing home data for the investigation. And on Tuesday, I began my first German class! For the next month, I will be taking class twice a week for 5 hours total. A little background on the class, a majority of the people in the class already had the class for a month, so I started the class with less knowledge, although I’ve been doing Rosetta Stone and know a lot of German nursing home vocabulary from the project that I’m working on. So when I entered the class, the class started asking me questions about where I’m from and about my hobbies (all in German) and it’s safe to say that I was really frazzled. I felt really lost that class especially because my mind was definitely thinking about my trip to Madrid early next morning, so I kept saying things in Spanish. My classmates were definitely confused by this! Hopefully next class will be better.
Fun fact: A German word I learned this week: “frühjahrsmüdigkeit” which means spring fever or feeling tired in spring (thanks to my colleague Simon for teaching me!)
On the 4th, I had an early flight to catch to Madrid for the Jornadas de Periodismo de Datos conference in Madrid. Once I arrived, Adolfo (one of the organizers) took me around to some local places to get food and drinks. Later in the day, we met with Kaeti, from the Washington Post (who was also speaking at the conference) and headed to El Confidencial for a tour of the newsroom. It was really cool to see their space and hear about how their team works. They gave us a presentation on how their data team works with designers and developers. They use a spreadsheet to keep track of their work (and work that is coming up) similar to a spreadsheet that was floating around a while back from the WSJ. They also chatted a bunch about how they use agile workflow in their newsroom and how that helps them keep on track with goals.
The next few days, I attended some sessions at the conference and had some awesome conversations with folks who wanted to know how data journalism in the US is like. I found it fascinating that many people regarded the US as this amazing place where you have the freedom to do whatever you want in news apps and also had thoughts that we get data very easily. Now, I know that there are countries that have very young FOI laws, like Spain, and some places that have no laws, but in the US, we definitely don’t get all of our data easily or without having to deal with some level of ridiculous bureaucracy. It was also interesting to hear about how the people in Spain are using FOI laws to get data. Also, it was great to know that dealing with data in PDFs get a universal groan from everyone in the room no matter what language or culture (because they are awful!)
On Saturday, I gave my workshop on plotting data in R in Spanglish! I think it was a bit hard to teach the workshop since there were many different levels of people in the room, but in general, I received good feedback from the session. I also got the chance to work with the R studio interface in Spanish, which definitely tested my knowledge of Spanish and of how well I know the layout of R studio in English.
Here’s a picture of me during my workshop:
In Madrid, I also got some time during the conference to explore the city a bit with Kaeti. The hardest thing for me was the food, since I’m vegetarian. A lot of the places served meat and didn’t have vegetarian options, so I didn’t eat too much while I was there (which explains why I was also super tired). I also realized that I’m always on time and really enjoy having a set schedule. While we were there, it was really all up in the air when dinner or lunch was going to be and things just were delayed. I realize that I don’t like that at all! I missed having some control and walking fast while I was there, because everything was so leisurely.
Overall, the few days in Madrid for the conference were filled with some interesting conversations about data, FOI, and R. It’s also so great to see that there was so much interest in data journalism in Madrid as there were a lot more people there than previous years, according to the organizers. Also, it was awesome to see so many women at the conference (which is different from other European data events I’ve gone to recently).
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