MAPPING THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ON DATA JOURNALISM AND OPEN DATA

During the past decade, the available information has increased exponentially from governmental and private sources. On one side governments all over the world are releasing data with the goal to increase their transparency, provide better services to their citizens, and enhance overall efficiency. On the other side, the rise of social media introduced an era of abundant information and instant news propagation like nothing experienced before. Journalists are called to evaluate and process an immense volume of information in this sifting field of direct news and novel emerging data sources(Gray et al., 2012).
In the past journalists were unaccustomed to the use of freely available data in vast quantities and although the use of data, especially in the field of investigative journalism, is not novel the plethora of technological advantages(Calvo-Rubio and Ufarte-Ruiz, 2021; Hassan and Albayari, 2022) provide them with the ability to present a compelling story in a different scale in the data that had been processed and in the potential to visualize and therefore communicate it more compellingly. But these capabilities require specialized technical skills(Veglis and Bratsas, 2017) by the journalists and this can be an important impediment to their utilization of open data.
Data journalism(Bhaskaran et al., 2022; Calvo-Rubio and Ufarte-Ruiz, 2021) and open data(Hurbean et al., 2021; Ismail and Yusof, 2022; Zhang et al., 2018) themselves are well-researched fields in academia but the combination of these two fields is still limited. In this paper, we present a mapping of academic endeavours in the field of data journalism with the use of open data aiming not only to categorize the developments in the field but also to identify benefits and barriers.