Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

A separate ticket is required to attend this masterclass. If you already have a conference ticket and would like to attend but haven't yet purchased a masterclass ticket, please contact us at [email protected]

This full-day session with Data Desk’s Sam Leon and Louis Goddard teaches cutting-edge techniques for illuminating fossil fuel supply chains and energy infrastructure projects. Using AIS and aviation data, customs datasets, satellite imagery, and more, participants uncover not only the international flow of oil and gas but also the movement of equipment, materials, and workers during the construction of major fossil fuel projects. Real investigative exercises help translate these tools into actionable reporting.

A separate ticket is required to attend this masterclass. If you already have a conference ticket and would like to attend but haven't yet purchased a masterclass ticket, please contact us at [email protected]

This full-day session with Data Desk’s Sam Leon and Louis Goddard teaches cutting-edge techniques for illuminating fossil fuel supply chains and energy infrastructure projects. Using AIS and aviation data, customs datasets, satellite imagery, and more, participants uncover not only the international flow of oil and gas but also the movement of equipment, materials, and workers during the construction of major fossil fuel projects. Real investigative exercises help translate these tools into actionable reporting.

Scraping data from the Internet has become a key skill for many investigations and reporting projects that rely on data. Building custom web scrapers used to require solid coding skills but in two recent environmental investigations supported by the Pulitzer Center, we used Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Claude to help us build scrapers for online content without much coding skills. This hands-on workshop will teach you how to inspect a website and choose a scraping strategy. Then it will demonstrate, step-by-step, how to build web scrapers that have been used in the investigations. LLM prompts will be shared and participants can follow along to create their first custom web scraper.

After attending you will understand website structure for scraping and be able to use LLMs to build basic web scrapers.

Participants should come with their own laptops, register a free account on any of the main LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude) and have a free Google Colab account at colab.research.google.com.

No coding skill is required but basic familiarity with LLMs is recommended.

Scraped data can often be the backbone of an investigation, but some websites are more difficult to scrape than others. This session will cover how to approach dealing with tricky sites, including coping with captchas, IP blocking, and browser fingerprinting. We'll cover how to figure out what might be preventing you from scraping a site, and what options you have to proceed, with their pros, cons, and costs.

This is an advanced session aimed at people who already have experience of writing code to scrape websites and want to move up to the next level: participants will leave with an understanding of how to deal with hard-to-scrape websites, plus the tradeoffs of different approaches. No tools are required to follow along, just a web browser.

Learn how the investigative team at the Danish Altinget used scraped data from 350 inspection reports to map structural inequality in Copenhagen’s nurseries and kindergartens, and how the method can be applied to other local areas and welfare institutions.

This is a hands-on workshop introducing the practical use of Earth Index, a tool that uses AI to search for user-defined patterns in satellite imagery across large areas, anywhere on the planet. It is a game-changer for environmental journalism, opening up major possibilities: from spotting hotspots of illegal mining, to quantifying industrial farming in a region, or mapping new roads pushing into forested areas.

During the session, we will do a guided walkthrough of the platform and work through step-by-step exercises to explore its core features: how to create a project, define an area of interest, generate positive and negative labels, run predictions, refine the results, and export findings. We will also share practical tips and best practices based on the Pulitzer Center’s methodology for successfully integrating Earth Index into an environmental investigation, including how to audit results, reduce false positives, and inform field reporting.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a clear understanding of Earth Index’s strengths and limitations, and how to add it to their investigative toolbox.

IMPORTANT:

1. You must register in advance for this session to gain access to Earth Index. Please use this form to register:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0CXmCcA3SZyVfDMHO3l9suLK_RwCJUqz_IU-oymMRAFVSuQ/viewform
2. Please bring a laptop with Google Earth Pro installed. You can download it here: https://maps.google.com/intl/es/earth/download/gep/agree.html

No previous experience or coding skills are required. Those who sign up will receive free access to the tool and will be able to keep it afterwards.

Do you know what the telling signs of "non-authentic behaviour" - bots - are on social media platforms? This practical, hands-on presentation is for journalists interested in investigating bots across platforms - from Telegram and YouTube to TikTok. We'll use data research on bot networks and coordinated activity to learn how to identify bots, and discuss practical stories one can develop based on the data found. We will also give practical examples stemming from our research in Ukraine and Moldova, and present some insights into bot campaigns ahead of the June 2026 election in Armenia.

A key part of the session will focus on how things are changing with the rise of generative AI and the early shift toward more agent-like systems: what this means for bots, coordination, and the limits of traditional detection methods. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a clearer sense of how large-scale CIB operations can look in practice, and how to start identifying and documenting them across different platforms. The goal is to leave the session with concrete story ideas, investigative ideas, and practical methodological knowledge.

No programming skills are required to take part in the workshop, but prior experience with collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms will help participants get the most out of the session.

“Fueling Ecocide” is a cross-border, collaborative data investigation coordinated by EIC (European Investigative Collaborations) and EIF (Environmental Investigative Forum). Over the course of a year, 13 media outlets across four continents joined forces, asking a simple but crucial question: how much protected land and sea have we lost globally to oil and gas extraction?

To answer this question, we embarked on a mapping exercise of epic proportions. Using QGIS and Post-QGIS, we compared 315,000 protected areas from all over the world with 15,000 extraction blocks, spanning 120 countries.

For the first time, this work provides a clear global picture of the damage: 7,021 protected areas in 99 countries overlap with oil and gas projects. This represents a surface of approximately 690,000 km², just over the size of France, most of it under internationally recognized protection statuses. Through extensive reporting, they also identified 763 oil and gas companies involved, with the largest contributors headquartered in Europe.

In this session, the reporters involved in the project will take you through the makings of a data-driven global investigation. They will talk you through the trial-and-error process of handling and harmonising an immense geospatial dataset: which tools they used, which methodological choices they made, and which obstacles proved the hardest to overcome. They will explain how the team turned this data into impactful stories, collaborated across the globe, and what lessons they learned.

 To read more on the project and the story, go here: https://ecocide.reportersunited.gr/

Non-consensual intimate content sharing is a growing problem, disproportionately affecting women and marginalized people, and increasingly amplified by deepfakes and automated tools. What looks like chaotic “leaks” online is often a structured, organized, and profitable ecosystem.

In this session, we’ll show how we uncovered networks that steal, share, and monetize image-based sexual abuse. You’ll see the technical approaches we use: tracking digital traces, mapping channels, analyzing hosting setups, entering abusive groups safely, and spotting patterns in offshore companies. We’ll also explain how to map networks of abusers by understanding their ecosystem of filehosters, cloud services, and CDN layers.

Finally, we’ll share practical tips to safeguard your well-being when investigating abusive material. By the end, participants will be able to turn overwhelming, chaotic content into actionable insights, exposing the organized systems that enable and profit from abuse.

Algorithms are everywhere, but they're still extremely opaque. They affect us more and more, and often have a meaningful impact on our daily lives—especially when the public administration uses them. But it's incredibly hard to 1) get data and information about how they work, 2) understand it, and 3) explain it in a simple, impactful way.

In this session, we'll share different techniques that Civio has used to research and report on algorithms. We'll look into the ways in which one can crack open the black box of algorithms, from FOIA requests to court battles, reverse engineering to scientific reports. We will also explain how we analyse their outputs and how we make reporting that is often technical and complex more palatable for our readers. In the presentation, we will mention some particular examples from our reporting on algorithms, such as exposing facial recognition in doctor offices, algorithm bias when it comes to cancer detection, and a silly lie detector used by police.

We'll also talk about how we went to the Supreme Court to get the code of a system which decides -wrongly- who receives subsidies, and who doesn't. This session is suitable for beginners - you don't need to have had any experience reporting on algorithms in order to attend and follow the session.

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.

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