Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The European Union promises openness in its decision-making. But, despite this commitment, the European Commission and the Member States recently blocked transparency around key decisions on public spending and legislative proposals. Moreover, the Commission tightened its internal rules to limit freedom of information. These obstacles to transparency have hampered reporting on how the EU spent billions of euros of its post-COVID recovery fund and military aid for Ukraine.

The official veil of secrecy also restricts investigations into topics such as the EU's fight against Big Tech, the rollback of environmental laws, or human rights violations at the EU's external borders.

How can journalists push back against this reduction in transparency? This panel will discuss the mounting challenges for journalists covering the European Union, and how to fight back against the rising tide of opaqueness.

Large language models can do more than generate text – they can help clean and structure messy data files as well as enrich datasets. As LLMs increasingly become a useful tool for data journalists, the Ellmer package is a useful resource for R users to easily work with LLMs. The Guardian data team has used the Ellmer R package to clean and organise thousands of emails from the Epstein files, to investigate private equity firms in the United Kingdom, and to classify recipients of climate finance.

Using some of these examples, attendees will learn when this package can be the perfect tool for your investigation, which are the good practices when using LLMs, how to connect to an API of an LLM, how to write an efficient prompt, how to submit the prompts in bulk using the batch function for structured data and how to evaluate your results and iterate for improvements.

This is an advanced R session and we will assume that attendees have some prior knowledge of R.

Do you need help drafting an FOI request, writing a complaint about your FOI request being rejected, or understanding EU legislation? Are you looking for specific EU databases, experts, and sources? Come to the "FOI Cafe" for advice!

Please note: you need to book a spot in advance. You can do it HERE.