Coding for Journalists
Description
In the modern society journalism became much more than publishing raw data. The ability to process the big and often unstructured data, extract valuable information and give additional meaning to it becomes an in-demand skill for any journalist. However, some manually performed tasks are time consuming or seem impossible, but can be completed within minutes or even seconds with a script and appropriately chosen programming technologies.
Aim of the course
To demonstrate students how to formalize and solve given tasks with introduced technologies; to teach how to code focusing on the tasks they may need in practice (e.g., scrap data from the Internet; process targeted information in the text; handle data in csv, xlsx files or SQL databases; etc.).
Prerequisites
Bachelor diploma, English language B2 level.
Course content
Issues addressed in class sessions:
• Basics of python programming (variable types, conditional sentences, loops, file handling, etc.)
• Regular expressions for text processing (i.e., search/extraction/replacement of targeted text elements)
• Named entity recognition
• Web scrapping
• Handling csv, xlsx data files
• Working with databases: basic SQL statements
