Coverage
Fields of practice
Ten short pages, each on a single area of data and investigative practice, with a comparison table, a checklist and three questions.
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Field 01
Open data portals
How public data portals are organised, how to read a dataset description honestly, and why the gaps matter more than the downloads.
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Field 02
Cleaning data
The routine work that decides whether an analysis is sound: structure, types, duplicates, missing values and a record of every change made.
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Field 03
Statistical literacy
Averages, rates, percentages, uncertainty and correlation: the small set of ideas that prevents most published numerical errors.
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Field 04
Visualisation
Choosing a chart for the question, handling axes and colour honestly, and making a graphic readable for everyone.
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Field 05
OSINT techniques
Working with publicly available material lawfully: provenance, corroboration, documentation and the boundaries that must not be crossed.
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Field 06
Geolocation
Establishing where and when a photograph or video was made, using landmarks, shadows, weather records and independent imagery.
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Field 07
Access to records
Writing a request that can be answered, understanding exemptions and fees, and treating a refusal as information rather than a dead end.
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Field 08
Company registries
Reading filings, mapping ownership and control, and understanding what a register proves and what it merely records.
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Field 09
Reproducibility
Organising an analysis so that another person can rebuild the number, and publishing enough for a reader to check it.
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Field 10
Ethics and privacy
Proportionality, minimisation, security and harm assessment when an investigation involves data about identifiable people.
How the field pages are organised
Every field page follows one sequence: what the thing is, how it works in practice, what it establishes, the errors that recur, the checks that prevent them, the obligations or conventions that apply, and the questions that remain open. Repeating the shape allows two fields to be compared and makes it obvious when information is missing rather than merely absent from the page.
The pages are descriptive. They contain no recommendations aimed at a particular newsroom, assess no vendors and rank nothing. Where the evidence or the practice is genuinely contested, the page says so instead of adopting the simpler version.
Three groups
Sources
Where records come from and what they omit: open-data portals, access to official records, company registries.
Analysis
Making a file usable and reading it honestly: cleaning, statistical literacy, visualisation, reproducible method.
Verification
Testing material found in public: OSINT technique, geolocation and imagery, ethics and data protection.
How to read one of these pages
A field page is not written to be read straight through, and using it that way wastes most of its value. The numbered sections carry the procedure and can be entered at the point that matches the work in hand. The comparison table is the part to keep open while working, because it sets out what a given source, signal or choice can and cannot establish. The checklist near the foot is deliberately short: it holds the checks that are cheap to run and expensive to skip, not a full account of the field.
The three questions at the end are the ones that arrive most often in practice, and they are answered in a way that can be disagreed with. Each page then links to the two fields beside it and to the long guides, because the sequence in which techniques are combined is what the guides add.
Checklist
- Read the section that matches the step you are on, not the whole page.
- Keep the comparison table beside the work; it is the reference part.
- Treat the checklist as the minimum, not the method.
- Follow the links at the foot to see where the technique sits in a sequence.
- Check any unfamiliar term against the terminology list rather than guessing.
What the fields do not cover
Four adjacent areas are missing from this list, and they are missing on purpose rather than by oversight. There is no page on interviewing or on writing craft, both of which belong to reporting in general and are covered better elsewhere than they would be here. There is no page on a particular analysis tool or language, since the point of a field page is the decision, not the syntax that expresses it. There is no jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction treatment of access or media law, which would amount to advice. And there is no page on obtaining material that is not public, in any form.
Coverage will extend only where a procedure can be described from documentation rather than assembled from inference. The pages that are absent are listed here and on the project page for the same reason a dataset's coverage gap is worth stating: an honest gap tells a reader more than a page written to fill a space.
Where the fields connect
The divisions are a convenience for reading, not a description of how the work happens. A single story usually crosses all three groups: a registry search identifies an entity, an access request produces the correspondence, a dataset provides the scale, imagery fixes a location, and the documentation layer holds it together well enough to publish.
For that reason each page links to the fields adjacent to it, and the method guides show the same steps assembled into a working sequence. Reading a field page alone gives the technique; reading it beside a guide shows where in the process it belongs and what depends on it.