Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Have you ever come across a striking data visual and wondered: "How the hell did they make that?" Your follow-up question may be: "Can I achieve that too with the resources I have?" In this session, we start with a deep dive into the (technical) production of two data visuals. Then, for the third visual, it's your turn to figure out how it might have been made. Finally, we launch our online inventory and subjective guide of data visualization tools - a work in progress you can contribute to!

Heads up: we won't teach any tool in depth, but we'll highlight a range of options so you can find an approach or tool that best fits your needs and constraints (e.g., limited budget, small team, learning curve…).

Description to follow

Court decisions are treasure troves of verified facts—but they're often locked in dense legal documents that the public never sees. This session will present a specific methodology for extracting, contextualizing, and translating judicial findings into compelling multimedia narratives that serve human rights advocacy, accountability, and education.

We want to present the methodology we developed in the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina - BIRN BiH - on how to connect court findings into coherent narratives, translating court-verified facts into accessible, informative, and educational content.

We will use three BIRN BiH developed databases to demonstrate our methodology. Additionally, we want to present how we used court facts to develop educational tools. Many journalists and human rights documentalists treat court records as supporting evidence for stories. This session will show how court decisions themselves can be the primary story—and how systematic extraction creates accountability infrastructure that outlasts individual articles or projects.

Investigating data-driven stories on environmental health, long-term pollution, or biodiversity loss often means facing a structural problem: the data don’t exist, or have never been systematically collected, not even by public institutions. In these cases, the only option is to produce them from scratch.

This session presents a journalism-led methodology that integrates citizen science and social research as core tools of investigative data journalism. Developed through collaboration with scientists while preserving editorial independence, the approach is grounded in concrete case studies and practical experience.

Drawing on projects conducted with communities exposed to chronic industrial pollution, environmental degradation, and conflict, the session shares practical tools, workflows, and lessons learned for designing, collecting, validating, and using original data when datasets are missing.

Participants will learn how to:
-design and run a citizen science project for investigative reporting, from framing research questions and defining indicators, to engaging and training citizen scientists, data collection, quality control, and journalistic use of the data- establish effective collaboration with scientists during research design, data collection, and verification through shared protocols and a memorandum of understanding
- design a rigorous social research process to investigate community needs and priorities using surveys, interviews, and qualitative methods, including collecting and analysing texts to identify trends, patterns, recurring themes, and undercovered issues
- integrate community-generated data, social research findings, and scientific measurements into original investigations and engaging stories.

The session also demonstrates how this approach can generate multiple, high-impact outputs: original investigative reporting based on co-produced data, policy briefs grounded in empirical evidence, and social research outputs in scientific journals.