As part of the "Developing Capacity for Data Journalism in Turkey" project which had been initiated by dokuz8NEWS, the second training session has been held in Istanbul with participation of 18 people from İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, Hatay, Konya, Adana and Antalya between 10-12 May.
[mks_dropcap style="letter" size="52" bg_color="#ffffff" txt_color="#000000"]T[/mks_dropcap]he opening session of the training has been held by one of the founders of dokuz8NEWS, Yunus Erduran with a presentation on the project details and expectations from the participants. Following Erduran's introduction, another founder Gökhan Biçici has presented the history of dokuz8NEWS network and welcomed participants to the 27th of such trainings, as well as informing the participants regarding the preparations for #TurkeyElections that will be held on June 24, 2018. Erduran has taken the stage again after Biçici and presented the participants with samples that have been published after the first training session in March 2018. What is Data Journalism? The first session as part of the training was conducted by Dr. Efe Kerem Sözeri, an academic at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam University in the Netherlands and expert on data journalism, as a video conference. Dr. Sözeri has presented his session on what is and what is not data journalism, explaining the brief history of data journalism. Data Source Project Final session on the first day was conducted by Asya Durmaz, representing verikaynagi.com (datasource.com) the new project by Izlemedeyiz (Watching) Association that had also initiated the Turkish version of Factometer under the title of Doğruluk Payı in Turkey. Durmaz has elaborated on the hardships of accessing data in Turkey, yet also showed how one may access this data and mine it. Durmaz also shared her experiences of the project and answered questions of the participants. Guardian Data Team Second day of the training has started with a presentation by Caelainn Barr, of the Guardian Data Project editor. Barr has presented one of the best examples of data journalism globally, the Guardian Data Project with a video conference she has prepared for dokuz8NEWS, explaining the process of data journalism news curation as part of the Team, with solid examples. Excel as a tool for data journalism Following the Guardian Data Project experiences, workshop has been held on data sources, research, data mining, data analysis. A detailed workshop on uses of Excel has been held by Mehmet Şafak Sarı and Yunus Erduran. Rekognize.io: a new Twitter analysis tool In the final session on the second day, technologist Onur Mat has presented rekognize.io, a new data analysis tool he has developed for social media. This tool allows users to analyze Twitter following and network structures, presents a map and makes data mining and visualisation highly practical. dokuz8NEWS uses rekognize.io actively for its data journalism news pieces. On the final day of the training session, modules on data visualisation have been held. The data sets that had been prepared with the work of the first two days have been visualised by the participants, and infographic news have been prepared by using Infogram. The participants infographics have been voted by everyone in the training by using another online tool. There is still one more training session on data journalism as part of the dokuz8NEWS trainings in 2018.