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.
