Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Projects involving FOI requests to multiple bodies often create significant challenges, from different file formats and data trapped in PDFs, to organisations providing data in different structures and different levels of detail. To get the big picture often requires data extraction, cleaning, reshaping, and checking.

In this session, we will share a series of tips and tools used to manage one project — including vibe coding with AI — which can be used to make any multi-response FOI project more efficient and accurate. No prior knowledge is required. By the end of this session, attendees should be able to design a data structure for an FOI project, use a range of tools, including AI, to extract, reshape, clean, and combine data from FOI responses, and design a data validation process to check AI outputs.

You will need a laptop with Google Drive and an account with an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Copilot. Installing Tabula and Open Refine will help you get more out of the session.