The objective of this course is to equip students with an interest in geo-journalism skills to deliver spatial products and thematic information in a condensed, easily understandable format addressing the appropriate level for broad societal uptake.
Stories about our Planet are broad by nature and it is the job of a journalist to help pin down the often interconnected reasons that drive environmental change. The growth of large, publicly accessible datasets presents the media community with new opportunities, but this also comes with the need for new skills to turn this trove of information into easy-to-understand, evidence-based stories. Simultaneously, ITC/UT has been teaching applied geo-information sciences for +60 years, but with increasing emphasis on academic skills in recent years. According to a recent survey, however, more than 80% of our alumni do not pursue an academic career. Therefore, an all-new MSc course on geo-journalism is presented which teaches students to combine geodata, data analytics, and various Bodies of Knowledge (BoK) in creating compelling (cartographic) infographics to support their storytelling. Using this knowledge and skill, students are enabled to create compelling (cartographic) infographics in minutes rather than days. These infographics are fully semantically enriched, allowing others to see and question the data sources and underlying analyses. With each course assignment, students gradually populate their online NEWSroom with blog articles annotated by these (cartographic) infographics. As portfolio of the student’s environmental storytelling efforts, this NEWSroom also helps improve their personal branding since their reporting is automatically indexed by Microsoft Bing and Google search because of the Semantic Web.
The skills taught in this course provide important ‘spill-overs’; the open-source technology stack used not only facilitates fact-checking of claims made in news and blog articles, but also those in scientific journal articles. Studies show that only 10~30% of published science articles are reproducible. Many argue this is a logical result of the publishing format as in most papers textual reference is made such as “this experiment was conducted as previously reported [insert reference here]” instead of a live reference to the online executable algorithm and workflow to recreate the results. Our hope is that it will enable those with an enthusiasm for storytelling to use these rapid geo-information pipelines to support their valorisation efforts in publishing (reviews) of scientific findings and how to stimulate viral spread across the Internet.