 Cool. Thank you. Yeah, I hope you guys got your Lama selfies in. I did. It's hard being the session after the Lamas, but I think I'll manage. Welcome everyone to the session. Thanks for joining me and the other speakers throughout the conference and thanks to the organizers for making everything so smooth and so fun and so interesting. My session, as you can see, is about data archival, specifically when it comes to data journalism. So let's just jump in. That's me on screen twice. I'm a journalist, a freelance journalist from Nairobi, Kenya, which by the way, it's about 10 p.m. here, so education. I've been to only one other CSV conference, the one last year, but I guess coming this year makes me a veteran, I guess. And so I've been a data journalist specifically for about two years. I was with the organization Code for Africa, for those of you who know them, that was my entrance into the wonderful world of data journalism. So just to begin, I'll start with the question of what is data journalism? Obviously from the word itself, the obvious thing would be to say that data journalism is just data plus journalism, which is fine, but a more accurate or a more in-depth look into it is the combination of journalists' ability to storytell, because at the end of the day, that's what journalists do, they're storytellers, and they're so-called knows-for-news, combined with this super-large range of information that is now available to us through the web, through the digital landscape. If you give data to each type of profession, they'll do something different with it. And I think for journalists, this is what makes data journalism a separate field. And so the data journalism has been around for a while now, for those of you who attended CCUA's talk yesterday, her keynote speech yesterday, which was very interesting. She delved deep into lots of the things that are going on in the world of data journalism. And a lot of that stuff for journalists, a lot of the stuff that's so exciting for us has been the scraping and gathering of information, the analysis, the visualizations, the news apps, what have you, there've been lots of steps forward in that field, and there continue to be more and more creative ways to use data journalism to tell interesting stories. But one thing that journalists are not good at is sort of taking a break after a story to just look back and think about what they've done and what should be done with that. We're always looking to go on to the next thing, the next story, the next breaking news, journalism kind of has its competitive side, and so it's always about who can get the story fast or who can tell the best story and who can get the best angle. And that leaves the question of data archival to that journalistic stories as a big question mark. And a quote that I was not able to find the original person who said it but was popularized by Philip Graham is that journalism is the first draft of history which is said a lot in the journalism realm. Maybe we're just being so centered but I think there is some truth to that. This is a good time to experience that in the time of the COVID-19, ever since December when the first story started coming out and even till now as the numbers keep being monitored, keep being talked about, keep finding new angles, finding new things, finding new ways the world is changing and all this is fast being documented by journalists. So for the researchers, the writers, the novelists, in the future who write about this time, a lot of them will find themselves looking back to the news stories that were written by journalists during this time. And so that means it's really important to archive our things or make sure that future generations, no matter what technology exists then, can still have access to the wonderful data stories that are being released every day, just the way we have access to newspapers that were published a hundred years ago. So in terms of looking at data stories, journalists have their own ways to go about telling their stories, that's what they're good at. But when it comes to thinking about archival, it should be something that's thought about from the very beginning and something that should be in the conscious mind of everyone from the editors and the news publishers to the journalists themselves. It should be something they're thinking about from the beginning. And so the first thing of course is that there needs to be that care given to the archival process. Most news organizations, if not all use content management systems. And so data stories, especially the very dynamic ones, the ones that have interactive graphs and photos and videos and all sorts of fun things are not able to be archived the way traditional media is. The way text can be archived or even video and audio can be archived. So the first thing is that within the newsroom itself because even freelancers like myself do have to deal with newsrooms. So the newsroom itself needs to be very aware that even when they go to the steps of making news apps or using other tools to write data stories, they need to have that in mind. And then another thing to think about is, or rather the first thing after that to think about is the archiving of the whole data story, the whole thing in all its elements. So whether it's a combination of the text, plus maps, plus graphs, plus other interactive data visualizations to photos, to video and audio. The whole thing as a package, it needs to be thought out how the whole thing can be archived. And then the last thing or what I see as the last thing is the links within the story. So I'm sure you've all had experiences of reading a news story and it's really something you're enjoying. And the writer, the journalist has referred to a study by the UN or just another link that's not on the website of the news story and you click on the link and it's blank or like you don't get access to it because it's been moved or something else. And I think that's something that we're more and more dealing with because in the past, what news organizations do a lot, especially the traditional ones, once they moved online, is that they would never link anything outside of their news website. So even though they mention a study, they'll never link that study. All they'll do, the most they do is link to another story within their website because I guess they need those retention rates on their websites. But what data journalism has brought about is the willingness to share information and be open about where you've gotten your data or where you've gotten some of the things that you're using within your story and now that has brought in the issue of archival of those links. So I think that would be the last thing. So as I said, the first step is just thinking about the future and what you want to achieve, how you want to be able to preserve what you've written, what you've worked on, not only for future generations who would want to know what was going on in the world in 2020, but also just for your own personal portfolio as a journalist, because journalists, I mean, we move around, we work with different organizations. For freelancers like myself, we have bylines in all sorts of different news organizations. So that's something that needs to be thought about because, you know, news organizations may shut down, may be merged with others. And so there needs to be some thought put into how to preserve some of these, some of the stories we write. So the first thing is scaling down. When these stories are written, especially the ones that are very dynamic, something that can be thought about at the top level, that is at the level of the publishers and the editors is how to preserve at least a simple HTML version or just a static page of the data story. Some of these stories are quite, they include lots of different elements, but one option, which is not the favorite option at all because it loses quite a bit. But just in terms of thinking about the options, it is on the table that perhaps a few months after the story goes live, you know, after traffic has been driven down and people have seen the story quite a bit, maybe six months down the line, the option may arise to just preserve the HTML, a simple HTML of the data story. This is because the CMSs that we use currently are incapable of archiving data stories as they occur, as they are with all the elements. It's something new and so the technology, I guess, is not yet there, but another thing is also the fact that we do use other apps as well to write data stories. So some of you may be familiar with shorthand. Shorthand is a news app, basically, that's like WordPress, but for data stories because you can add in so many different elements, you can add in your own HTML and CSS. And it looks like it looks very pretty because you can put photos and videos and move things and have the text bleeding into the photo, you can have the photo in the background, you can do so many things. And such apps are being used by news organizations from very small ones to very big ones. And so the question is, what if shorthand goes under? What happens to all those stories that were published through the app? And so scaling down is just one of the options that exists. Another one is the large commercial libraries and archives that already exist and are already being used for the traditional archiving, especially when it comes to newspapers and for some also digital, normal digital news stories. These include ProQuest, LexisNexis and the like. This is something that is also needs to be rethought because especially if your news organization is not already on a web archiving platform, bringing up some of these commercial libraries might be a bit of a tough thing to do within a newsroom. Newsrooms are notoriously very tight-fisted with funds, understandably, especially in this age where they're still trying to rethink their business models. And so hooking up themselves to all these other things, they would see it as someone who's experienced the newsroom vibe. They'd see it as just another extra thing that you don't need to worry about now, especially if you're just a journalist. The way they see it is that you should just focus on telling your next story and leave all the high-level thinking to the editors and the publishers and the owners. And so bringing up some of these things would be really hard, but it is something that can at least start being thought about or being put on the table or being forwarded in terms of ideas on how to ensure all aspects of the news stories that are being told by journalists within any given newsroom are reserved for posterity. The last two methods are some of my favorite because they put the power back into the journalist's hands. And especially because journalists are thinking a lot about some of these things, especially those who are, I mean, I guess it's all of us who are always going to the next story and thinking of the next thing, but especially those within newsrooms who have it a bit harder and have editors on their back constantly. These are a bit quicker methods. So the first is taking a video, taking videos of their news stories. So I'll just escape from the presentation mode. And I think we're all familiar with this site of seeing video game gameplay on YouTube or wherever. This is just, I just found a random Minecraft gameplay. And this is what I'm talking about. So we can borrow this same aspect from gamers and use it to preserve our stories. So if you could just, it's like taking a screen cap of your data story, as you scroll through the different elements of what it can do. So for example, if you have something that has an interactive graph, you can scroll through, click around, click on it as it's being recorded and be able to preserve that for yourself, for your own portfolio and employment history and also for future generations. Because as the maybe different technologies come around, you just need to update the video quality or whatever and still have that in your archives somewhere. Also the news organizations themselves are able to archive videos at least because videos is something we've had for a while. So even the news organizations could benefit because then they're able to at least archive videos before we figured out a way to archive data stories as they exist. So that's one way. Another way is archiving links, which I mentioned before. So as I mentioned, we've probably all had the experience of going through a news story and seeing, as you can see on my screen, it's a link unembed from Twitter. And I'm sure you've all had the experience of either this is just a broken link and it says something like the media does not exist anymore or something of the sort or even if it's just a normal link within the article and then you click on it and it's no longer existing. An option, this is a story I did a while ago, an option that exists is using applications such as archive.is to preserve links. So this works for everything, but in my case, since I wanted to preserve a tweet, I used the tweet, but you can imagine that the Kenya Met Department deletes this tweet, so far it's still up, but what if they delete it or they delete the account or Twitter doesn't exist anymore? This actually preserves the tweet and the discourse that went on underneath the tweet as well. So I think that's super neat. It's super easy. It puts the power back into the journalist's hands now that we've started adding links on our stories that lead to other people's work. Yeah, so that's all I had for today. That's the selfie. That's the selfie I got with one of the llamas, literally like a few minutes before the talk, but those are my contacts. There's my email. I'm on Twitter at Soila underscore Kenya. And then I think the presentation is on the website, on the CSV conference website, but there it is as well, in case you want to jump in, yeah. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, so there was a lot of great chatter in the chat. We'll move some of that over to Slack, but it'd be good for you to take a look at that too. One question was just this idea of recording a story as it's happening, kind of like the Minecraft recording. There were a couple of comments about that. Are there good examples of that happening in journalism? I mean, your example is Minecraft, which I think is an awful idea, but are there good examples that you know of? Maybe you can put those in Slack or? I think I'll put them on Slack, yeah. Yeah, yeah, because it's a great idea. And there were several people who had said that I hadn't even thought about it. I mean, it's, I hear about my nieces and nephews watching these videos of people playing video games and my other family members say, oh, that sounds so ridiculous. And I think to myself, actually, it sounds so interesting. I would love to watch someone like that. So it's, it goes with journalism, so it's a great idea. Okay, we're gonna move on to the next presenter.