[ecrea] special issue of Digital Journalism: Data journalism research Studying a maturing field

Call for papers for a special issue of Digital Journalism: Data 
journalism research Studying a maturing field

The rise of post-factual politics has made data journalism, the 
journalistic collection, analysis, curation and publication of data 
(Coddington, 2015), more relevant than ever. Technological innovations, 
such as automation and bots, have led to the spread and diversification 
of data journalism, which is increasingly applied beyond elite news 
organizations. Recent projects like the Panama Papers have been 
described as data journalism at its best, while other examples of data 
journalism recently have come under criticism, for example when election 
forecasts by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight or The New York Times’ The 
Upshot did not predict the success of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the 
move to more interactive forms of data visualization have struck a chord 
with an increasingly active audience, and the inclusion of a chapter on 
Data Journalism in the 2017 edition of the AP style book can be seen as 
a final sign that this field of journalism is maturing.

At the same time as data journalism is maturing, scholarly interest in 
this field has grown as well. The special issue Journalism in an Era of 
Big Data (2015), edited by Seth Lewis, was a pioneering special issue, 
published in a moment of experimentation. Scholars reflected on how the 
abundance of data affected the news, and highlighted computation and 
quantification in newsrooms in relation to how new practices and roles 
may impact norms, routines and ethics. It was the starting point for a 
growth of data journalism studies where the majority of the studies 
consisted of national and institutional case studies, and where the 
focus in particular was on knowledge production in newsrooms, often of 
the elite media and predominantly from the United States, United 
Kingdom, Germany and the Nordic countries.

The early studies on data journalism identified and described the 
emerging practice of data journalism in newsrooms in the Western 
hemisphere, but few took a comparative perspective or studied data 
journalism in other parts of the world. Furthermore, while the evolving 
practice of data journalism has been subject to predominately 
exploratory research (e.g. Aussenhoffer, 2017) or taken a 
future-oriented approach with focus on the potential and novelty of data 
journalism (Anderson, 2012), the growing body of research on data 
journalistic practices has yet to find explanations for how data 
journalists are adapting journalistic versions of computational methods 
to more traditional journalistic practice. As the practice has matured, 
there is now potential for scholarly research to evaluate and critique 
the move toward quantification in newsrooms, assessing if and where data 
journalism has been helpful for the development of the journalism 
practice. Since audience research into data journalism is notably 
absent, we still know little about the way the public uses, appreciates 
and learns from different forms of data journalism. In addition, because 
recent studies on data journalism have found that audience feedback and 
advanced interactive features have potential, but are still sparsely 
used in data journalism (Loosen et al. 2017; Usher, 2016), it is 
important to find explanations for why the audience is treated primarily 
as an imagined audience where reciprocal interaction is not yet taking 
place.

This special issue of Digital Journalism welcomes submissions, which 
broaden the theoretical, empirical and geographic perspective on data 
journalism as one particular form of digital journalism. Theoretically, 
since data journalism practices involve a convergence of disciplines, 
cross-disciplinary approaches can fruitfully combine insight from 
journalism theory with insight from fields such as data science, 
interaction design, or cognition studies. Empirically, there is a need 
for more reception studies; content analyses of different data 
journalism genres; news production studies focusing on smaller news 
organizations or cross-national collaborations, and case studies of 
criticized data journalism projects. Geographically, there is a lack of 
systematic comparative research and of studies mapping how data 
journalism is practiced in regions like Africa, Asia, and Russia where 
data journalists might face data scarcity or state control over information.

This special issue welcomes computational, qualitative and quantitative 
research on data journalism as well as conceptual papers from all 
theoretical perspectives.

Topics may include, but are not limited to research on:

• the way audiences use, evaluate and learn from different forms of data 
journalism, including data visualization and interactive data journalism,

• the impact of computational logics, artificial intelligence, 
intelligence augmentation and automation on data journalism practices,

• novel forms of finding, combining, creating and evaluating data for 
journalistic purposes,

• the sustainability of data journalism beyond legacy organizations, 
such as hyperlocal data journalism or data journalism involving other 
institutions, for example in terms of access to open data and the use of 
freedom of information legislation,

• the history and development of data journalism from a comparative 
perspective and beyond the Western world.

Information about submission:

Proposals should include the following: an abstract of 500-750 words 
(not including references) as well as background information on the 
author(s), including an abbreviated bio that describes previous and 
current research that relates to the special issue theme. Please submit 
your proposal as one file (PDF) with your names clearly stated in the 
file name and the first page.

Send your proposal to the e-mail address (ester.appelgren /at/ sh.se), 
(avd /at/ sam.sdu.dk) and (carlgustavl /at/ gmail.com).

Authors of accepted proposals are expected to develop and submit their 
original article, for full blind review, in accordance with the 
journal's peer-review procedure, by the deadline stated. Articles should 
be between 6500 and 7000 words in length.

*Timeline:*


Abstract submission deadline: *April 6, 2018*
Notification on submitted abstracts: *April 20, 2018*
Article submission deadline: *September 7, 2018*

The call can also be found here: 
http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/rdij-si-data-1q2018?utm_source=CPB&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JMO03936 


Editorial information:

·Guest Editors: Ester Appelgren, /Södertörn University,/ Carl-Gustav 
Linden, /Helsinki University/ and Arjen van Dalen, /University of 
Southern Denmark/

·Editor-in-Chief: Oscar Westlund

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