This talk will show the methodology behind The Guardian’s exclusive investigation into properties advertised as tourist destinations on Airbnb and Booking.com located in Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law. The Guardian found 760 rooms being advertised in hotels, apartments, and other holiday rentals in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as NGOs and activists warned that these companies are violating international law and profiting from war crimes.
In their investigation, they used geospatial tools, like PostGIS and QGIS, to localise accommodations on a specific geographical area, and to join these accommodations with shapefiles representing the borders of illegal settlements to identify those based within settlement boundaries. Using OSINT methods and Google Sheets, they designed a methodology to solve data challenges like duplicate and multi-platform listings, and listings with approximate locations.
In this session, attendees will come up with a robust methodology to find tourist accommodations in any geographical area, so they can reproduce the method for new stories.
Zeke is a Senior Software Engineer on the Guardian’s Digital Investigations team. The team contributes to journalistic research and builds secure tools to enable investigative journalism.
Data journalist at The Guardian Data Project team. I work on a variety of subjects - always finding the data angle in every story. Scraping, cleaning, data analysis, but above all JOURNALISM!
