No doubt, the power of the internet has changed profoundly the way in which journalists gather their information. To keep up with the growing amount of data digitally available, more and more tools for data-journalists are being developed. They help facing the challenge of handling vast amounts of data and the subsequent extraction of relevant information (here you can find our little collection of useful tools).
One powerful tool is detective.io, a platform that allows you to store and mine all the data you have collected on a precise topic. Developed by Journalism++, a Berlin- and Paris-based agency for data-journalism, it was launched one year ago.
By now, several investigations that used the tool have made headlines in Europe, amongst others The Belarus Network, an investigation about Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko and the country’s elite affairs by French news channel France24, and, most notably, The Migrants Files, a database on the more than 25,000 migrants who have died on their way to Europe since 2000. According to the developers at Journalism++, the applied methodology, measuring the actual casualty rate per migration route – has now been picked up by UNHCR and IOM. Another example is a still ongoing investigation on police violence, started by NU.nl, the main news website in the Netherlands.
What does detective.io do?
Basically, detective.io lets you upload and store your data and search relationships in it bywith a graph search using some network analyses. The tool, which is open source and still a beta version, structures and maps relationships between subjects of an investigation. This can be a vast number of entities such as organizations, countries, people and events.
In its basic version, the tool offers three generic data schemes that help structuring the data you have – for instance on a corporate network, the respective ownerships, branches, individuals involved and so on. To deal with more complex datasets, a customized data scheme is needed. There is no need for special skills to use detective.io but one needs to think hard about what elements of information are needed for the analysis before creating the data structure. However, such custom data schemes are not included in the basic version. The team at Detective.io offers several paid plans that include additional and/or customized data schemes and respective customer support.
There are special offers for NGOs and investigative journalists, too.
One powerful asset of detective.io is that investigations can be shared with collaborators and/or made public. Here you can have a look at what our Open Knowledge Directory looks like on detective.io and explore the relations of organizations and individuals by using the graph search.
Currently, the developers at Journalism++ are working on a new GUI/frontend for detective.io that will allow every user to edit the data schemes by themselves.
Here you can request an account for the beta version and if you are interested to collaborate in the development of detective.io, you can find the tool’s GitHub here.