Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Coffee is served in the Mediaforum (ground floor, lobby area) and on the third floor.

Want to see change from space and turn it into an interactive story? In this hands-on session, participants will use Copernicus Browser to locate areas of interest, upload their borders, and export high-resolution images. These images will then be turned into interactive sliders in Flourish to clearly show environmental changes, infrastructure expansion, or land-use transformations over time.

Using a real investigative example from a mountain area in Greece that was untouched in 2022 and became an active wind farm construction zone by 2025, participants will see how this workflow avoids common challenges, simplifies the process, and produces accurate visual comparisons.

The session also shows how before-and-after sliders can guide field reporting and support verification, helping journalists confirm that what is observed on the ground matches remote analysis. By the end of the session, participants will have learned a practical, reproducible workflow to turn satellite imagery into accurate visual comparisons that strengthen investigative storytelling and field verification, without requiring complex satellite analysis skills.

Prerequisites:

- To attend this session, no prior knowledge is required. Familiarity with QGIS, Copernicus Browser, or Flourish is helpful but not necessary.

- Tools: Participants should create a free Copernicus Browser account: https://www.copernicus.eu/en

- Participants should create a free Flourish account: https://app.flourish.studio/login

Optional: install QGIS for further exploration of satellite imagery (not required for the workflow demonstrated): https://qgis.org/download/

Google search is all the same since 1996? No, Google does change over time, but so slow that most people will not notice. The session will give you an update about recent changes (i.e. in the last 4-5 years), will point at workarounds where necessary and will show you what is really new and useful. Towards the end of the session it will give you some advanced Google dorks for immediate journalistic use, but also inspire you to build your own dorks and how to combine LLMs and Google searches.

To follow along, the participants should have used google operators before. After attending the session, you will have an up to date knowledge of Googles web search and other tools for journalistic use.

A Google account can be useful, but is not a must-have.

Investigace.cz has been monitoring TikTok in the Czech Republic for foreign influence operations for several years. and has learned to track the Czech TikTok space systematically.

In this hands-on session, they will share the lessons learnt with the participants:

-How to use scraping-as-a-service tools to collect TikTok data without coding
-How to decode TikTok URL hashes to extract hidden metadata (such as exact publication timestamps)
-How to work with the TikTok Research API
-How to think beyond simple metrics (views, likes, followers) and understand what TikTok data can and cannot tell you about influence operations

Participants will leave with practical skills and a realistic understanding of the limits of TikTok analysis. One doesn't need to be a data journalist to attend this session, but an understanding of how scraping works and basic data skills will be helpful!

Much of modern life is mediated through phones and apps. To investigate anything they touch, you need to understand where these apps' data comes from, what they're sharing, and with whom. But while network forensics & scraping for the web have received plenty of attention, the same isn't true for mobile, where techniques can be more challenging and clear guides are harder to find.

In this talk, we'll take a hands-on look at how HTTP Toolkit and other tools make it possible to easily capture, inspect & modify network traffic on mobile. We'll explore real-world examples of these techniques in data journalism, and you'll learn how you can use this to extract the datasets that power mobile apps, expose privacy leaks & security issues, and investigate exactly how apps do what they do.

This session provides a practical guide for using Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to investigate maritime irregularities. Our case study will be the Russian shadow fleet. The session is beginner-friendly, while the second case study will also be interesting to advanced AIS users and people with programming skills.

In the course of the session, we will present two case studies demonstrating how AIS data can be used to investigate the Russian shadow fleet.

The first case study will show how to use AIS data and vessel metadata to evaluate the environmental risk of shadow fleet traffic. The second is a recent investigation of Greenpeace Italy exposing a new ship-to-ship (STS) transfer hub off the coast of Sicily, revealing multiple sanctions breaches and a lack of oversight by Italian authorities. The investigation triggered two parliamentary inquiries and an investigation by the Chief anti-Mafia Prosecutor and was reported on extensively across national media.

This case study will showcase how the automatic STS detection in MarineTraffic, combined with network analysis (JavaScript, Gephi) and OSINT sources, can be used to trace chains of transfers that bring Russian oil into European ports.

Our session will offer a pro user's look into different proprietary and open-source AIS data platforms and evaluate their affordances (e.g., data export options, alerts, analytics functions), both with and without login. We will give an overview of additional data sources to cross-validate and enrich AIS data (Equasis, ITF Seafarers, IMRRA, order books, class society databases, IGPANDI) and share an internal tool we developed to access these sources automatically.

Participants will leave with practical knowledge of which AIS platforms to use for specific investigative needs, what open-source alternatives exist, and how to apply these tools in combination with network analysis and OSINT sources to uncover maritime irregularities.

Investigating migration is becoming a difficult beat. Sources are vulnerable, data is scarce, and governments and agencies routinely block access to information. 

In this session, two journalists with extensive experience on migration reporting will share how they navigate these barriers to still produce rigorous, impactful reporting. 

Nidžara Ahmetašević from Bosnia and Lydia Emmanouilidou from Greece will bring complementary perspectives shaped by their respective contexts, from the Balkan route to the Aegean. Together, they will walk you through their recent investigations (both nominated for the European Press Prize) that exposed systemic failures despite limited access. You will leave this session with strategies for investigating migration using alternative sources, document trails, and innovative reporting when official channels remain closed.

Stories that will be referenced in this session: 
Mines, memory, and migration on Bosnia’s perilous border, by Nidžara Ahmetašević
Unaccompanied children sleep on the floor in shifts in Greece’s ‘Model Camps’. The EU is aware. by Lydia Emmanouilidou, et al.

Coffee is served in the Mediaforum (ground floor, lobby area) and on the third floor.

This session will explore a new method: scraping on-screen text, using immense volumes of videos—from police dashcam videos to 24-hour news TV channels to fuel your investigation.

Antoine Schirer, a designer turned journalist, will share the methods and scripts he used for a 2025 Reporters Without Borders investigation to dissect months of programs of the controversial French news channel CNews.

Using Python, OCR, and fuzzy string matching, more than a million news banners were analysed to expose how the channel gets around broadcasting legislation.

We will look at other examples and invite you to discuss how to be creative with unusual - even non-existent datasets.

The BBC Shared Data Unit wanted to generate a map image for each authority in the UK showing the state of flood defences in that area — so they turned to the mapping tool QGIS’s built-in Python functionality.

In this session, you will learn how to generate and export dozens of maps in QGIS centred at different points, and how AI can help speed up the process.

To follow along, participants should have some basic knowledge of QGIS and be comfortable using Python or vibe coding.

After attending this session, participants should be able to understand how Python works in QGIS and use AI to help generate, understand, and adapt code. Participants should have QGIS and Python installed on the computer (qgis.org/download + python.org/downloads) and a free account with an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude

Most "big data" problems in journalism aren't really data problems, they're reading problems: a big leak, a ministry dump of 12,000 pages, or a FOI coming back as zip of PDFs. The instinct is to search, but keyword search assumes you already know what you're looking for. Which sometimes is the thing you don't know yet.

This session introduces embeddings: a technique that turns any text into a point in space, positioned by meaning, so texts with similar meaning end up close together. You stop searching a pile and start looking at it.

To make the idea tangible, we'll walk through a live semantic map we built of Google's "trending now" feeds from 125 countries, projected into 3D.

The method applies beyond trending searches and is applicable to TikTok captions, YouTube transcripts, court filings, a scraped forum, or years of parliamentary speeches.

We'll cover the full workflow end to end: how to embed your corpus, how to project it without losing what matters, how to build a map you can actually navigate, and where this approach breaks.

To follow along, participants should be comfortable running basic Python scripts on their laptop or in google collab.

After attending this session, participants will be able to take a large, unstructured text corpus and turn it into a navigable semantic map.

Participants should have Python installed on their computer, or have a google account where they can run collab. A Hugging Face account is recommended for generating embeddings. We will provide examples of text to work with, but if you have your own collection, feel free bring it, but make sure it's in a text format, as we won't cover how to convert PDF's into text.

What really happens behind the glossy surface of OnlyFans — and how do you investigate an industry built on secrecy, money, and blurred consent? After more than a year of reporting on the hidden economy around OnlyFans across five countries, I will take participants inside a world of agencies, chatters, fake identities, reseller servers, and leaked-content markets that platforms never talk about.

This session reveals how intimacy becomes a trap: how creators are manipulated by intermediaries, how their content is redistributed through underground Discord and Telegram networks, and how money flows through a web of crypto, burner accounts, and anonymous middlemen. Using findings from the cross-border investigation, From OnlyFans to OnlyScams, we will show how to uncover what the platform hides.

What attendees will take away:
- Investigating online sex-work ecosystems ethically and safely
- Techniques for undercover reporting, digital tracing, scraping, and mapping hidden networks
- Following payment trails and linking them to real actors
- Interviewing victims and insiders without causing additional harm
- Turning a sensitive, high-risk digital investigation into a powerful cross-border story

This is a practical session for journalists who want to explore one of the fastest-growing — and least understood — shadow economies on the internet.

This session is based on a case from Serbia, where we managed to identify a person whose identity Serbian authorities and pro-government media actively tried to hide. Starting from a blurred face in a leaked video, we combined basic OSINT with business registries, social networks, geolocation, face recognition tools, dark web email searches, and simple AI-assisted image analysis. We will walk the audience through each phase of the process,  and explain what worked, what failed, and how one can verify findings when evidence is being altered or erased in real time.

Attendees will leave with a practical workflow they can reuse in their own investigations: how to move from a fragment of visual evidence to a confirmed identity, how to cross-check business data with social platforms, how to use face search and morphological comparison safely, how to track digital behavior after supposed arrests, and how to document disappearing online traces before they are wiped. The goal is to share a method that can travel across borders and work in any country where power structures try to keep people invisible.

According to the OECD, 79% of companies use algorithmic management tools to automate recruitment, manage human resources and, above all, monitor and control workers. Subjected to constant algorithmic surveillance, salespeople in all sectors are always aware that their every move is being scrutinized. In digital professions, particularly video game
design, this digital activity tracking fuels burnout and workplace suffering. Delivery workers, especially those on bicycles, face even more serious consequences: the accelerated pace of their work leads to serious workplace accidents and even death. In France, the press has documented more than twenty fatal accidents since the arrival of Uber 
Eats and Deliveroo to the market in 2015.

How are these technologies deployed? How can we bypass corporate communications to document their real impact? How can we identify the hundreds of small businesses worldwide that market these devices? In this session, Clément Pouré, who has published around fifty investigations on workplace surveillance in the Age of AI, and a book on the same topic, will shed light on the surveillance practices of numerous multinationals such as McDonald's and TP (a world leader in call centers), but also on the more insidious practices of smaller companies across all sectors.

In this session, we'll briefly look into the history of workplace surveillance and its impact on employees, and chart an overview of the current technologies and the risks they represent. We will review the methods and sources that can be used to investigate the subject. The session is suitable for beginners, and no prior experience in algorithmic investigations is required to attend.

Closing session!