Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Drawing on real cross-border investigations from OCCRP's Research & Data team, this session will share the tools, techniques, and workflows the team relies on daily to support hundreds of journalists around the world. From geolocating images and tracking assets to social media investigations and smart browser hacks, this session will offer a practical, field-tested OSINT toolkit.

With shrinking newsroom budgets and a constant stream of "must-have" tools, it's harder than ever for journalists to know what OSINT tools might actually be worth using or paying for. This session cuts through the noise and focuses on what works right now.

Whether conference attendees are new to open-source research or looking for a sharp refresher, they will leave with concrete skills, trusted tools, and time-saving methods they can immediately apply to their own investigations.

Public archives all over the continent are full of historical stories waiting to be told. From armed conflict and genocide to colonialism or the environment, there are enough subjects that are still very relevant for investigative journalism.

This session will focus on the challenges and, more importantly, the possibilities of working with on-paper archives and analogue photographs. Is it possible to geolocate old prints without metadata or StreetView? Are there any old-school tricks to verify images? And what about AI slop that disguises itself as historical material?

We'll also discuss the importance of historical investigative work, possible subject areas, and useful tools and resources. The session is meant to inspire investigative journalists to dive headfirst into public archives and find relevant stories using their existing skills.

Predictive Markets are on the rise, and with them, easy money for insider knowledge and those who can influence their outcomes. While regulation is slow to catch up, investigations don't have to be. Polymarket is the most well-known of these predictive markets, and one thing that defines it is open data on all exchanges going on in a market.

This session will cover key concepts of Polymarket and the possibilities and limitations of investigating it. It will include basic Python code to extract and analyse its open data, and a new open source user interface tool you can use to quickly understand the market and accounts. In the end, we will learn techniques to identify suspicious actors from a few example markets.

Although some code will be shared during the session, you don't need to have a working knowledge of Python to participate.

Comic-book hero Tintin is, without a doubt, the most famous Belgian journalist who never lived. In the course of his 24 albums, which brought him from the early Soviet Union to the surface of the Moon, Tintin did preciously little *actual writing*, but there are still one or two lessons journalists can learn reading the adventures. ‘

Your hosts for this session have set a "trail" through the Tintin stories, and the legacy of Belgium's most famous boy adventurer. Come and compete in a light-hearted quiz which we hope will help you to fall in love with Herge's creation all over again - this time as a datajournalist!

Behind the polished facade of the multi-million euro football industry lies a darker reality. This presentation will take you inside two cross-border investigations into the opaque world of football sponsorships – tracking the unlicensed betting firms and crypto exchanges that now have a seat at the game’s top table.

The first exposed the influence and lucrative partnerships betting operators have with teams in more than 30 European leagues. The second uncovered the increasing foothold that crypto and investment companies have, revealing how unregulated sponsors infiltrated major sporting organisations.

We will explain how we obtained the underlying data and turned it into compelling stories connecting countries across the continent. The presentation will offer insights into the different tools and techniques we used – from trawling corporate accounts and financial registries, to exploiting Virtual Private Networks to assist with international research. We will discuss how these methods were used to build out investigative strands with international media partners and can be utilised for other cross-border projects.

Human rights violations in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and correctional facilities are particularly difficult for journalists to uncover: those affected are isolated, authorities are opaque, and data is often fragmented or non-existent.

How can we investigate places that hardly anyone has access to? What methods can we use to get a glimpse behind the walls or fences of those facilities? How do we obtain data? What evidence can support our investigation?

In this presentation we will explore ways to obtain information, access those closed institutions, strengthen the investigation, and develop strategic approaches.

The session will cover:
- Strategies for gaining physical access as a journalist to prisons and detention facilities
- Using Freedom of Information requests to obtain documents and datasets
- Working with fragmentary or missing data and still finding a story in there
- Building, protecting, and maintaining sources in highly sensitive environments

The presentation is aimed at investigative reporters, data- and document-driven journalists, and FOI enthusiasts who want to strengthen their ability to report on closed institutions and other hard-to-reach environments. Participants will leave with concrete tools, workflows, and ideas they can apply to their own investigations.

Reporting online today, journalists have to battle astroturf campaigns, fake news sites and sketchy shell companies to find out who is behind the story. It frequently leads to a frustratingly common question: who is behind this website?

Popular tools and approaches to investigating websites have been less reliable lately. There's more opaqueness in areas where there should be more transparency; crypto payments add a layer of confusion, and generative AI makes it easy for adversarial actors to operate hundreds of websites.

Using a range of OSINT tools and real-world investigations, we will walk you through investigating the provenance and ownership of websites: identifying the scope and scale of the network it belongs to — if any? Who’s behind the site, now and in the past? Who are the main actors promoting this website? Is it AI slop? Are foreign actors likely behind the domain?

While it is not always possible to fully unmask the owner of a site, using a thorough checklist of tools and techniques that we have used in real-world investigations we can help you make sure to reveal as much as possible about a website, and potentially uncover important clues. We will also walk you through how to conduct these investigations safely depending on your threat model, and how to document your findings reliably.

 This session is suitable for beginners and doesn't assume existing technical knowledge.

Police work is notoriously difficult to investigate. While police actions directly affect fundamental rights and guide politics and law-making, official data on their influence is scarce.

In this session, we will share some tools and methodologies on how to investigate the police sources. We will draw on more than ten years of investigations into different aspects of police violence and state abuse of power in Germany. We will also show how the data-driven journalism tools can help to make the underlying structures more visible, and present our recent investigation into police unions in Germany: who they are, want they stand for and how they influence the public debate and politics. We pieced together data from different sources and combined it with investigative journalism to draw the full picture.

We want to show how it is possible to do a data-driven investigative story despite missing data. We will focus on the following questions:

- How to build your own datasets when no official statistics exist? Which public data sources about the police are available? Which data can we get from ministry inquiries? What about social media?
- How to clean up, classify and analyze the data? Which tools are helpful in combining manual and automated workflows?
- How to tell a complex data-driven story without this one headline? What are judicial and editorial hurdles when publishing a sensitive topic?
- What can investigative and data journalists gain from close collaboration? What worked well? What would we do differently?

In this session, we’ll show you how we approached a sensitive topic: mapping the potential exposure of all schools to the use of pesticides from surrounding agricultural activities. We will explain  how - working with scientists - we came up with a robust methodology,  found the data we needed and then crunched it to tell us where to go to make truly data-driven reporting on the ground.  

This investigation, published in Le Monde in December 2025, has sparked a lot of national and local interest thanks to its interactive map. Attendees will leave the session with a clear step-by-step guide to get started and adapt the ambition of the investigation to their own capacity. Feel free to bring with you any datasets that would help to map similar issues in your country.

You can read the main story in English here
Free access to the map in French here

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!

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.