Time for Scottish journalists to break out. Programming for journalists and journalism for programmers runs from August 25-27th in St Petersburg, Florida, with Hacks/Hackers offering two exclusive opportunities for members: a scholarship (worth $795!) to a three-day training workshop (pay your own fare) and an API challenge from Daylife  where they will sell your app and give you 70% of the revenue. Deadline is July 24.

In Investigative Journalism (2nd edition, Hugo de Burgh, publisher: Routledge) the whole journalist data issue is raised by UK film expert Gavin MacFadyen who notes that Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) mapping & measuring relationships, important for investigative journalism, are almost non-existent in the UK.

“CAR as used and taught in the US and Scandinavia, is virtually unavailable” [in the UK]. Sheffield University’s Mark Hannah notes that Sheffield’s teaching module “does not set students tasks in Computer Assisted Reporting to analyse statistical data.”

In contrast, at the University of Missouri, McFadyen points out that CAR is employed to download, digest and analyse large quantities of statistical data. Important stories affecting ‘airline safety, public health, road transport accidents and environmental issues’ can be found, all of which require CAR techniques to extract it.  And certainly journalist Karl Larsson made much of his data hacking knowledge in the best selling Millennium Trilogy.

This week Nick Eardley who writes for Allmediascotland  tells of a recently playing the new tricks role of the internet desk/phone based journalist, pitted against the old hacks knock-on-doors and press flesh, print journalist, to see who could produce the best day's news story from Anstruther in Fife.

Print won hands down, as there’s not much on the Internet about Anstruther (36 results on Google news, about 704,000 results on eveything, 10,500 results on blogs including the James and Mary lifeboat being restored.)  But walking and talking round the town is bound to yield news.

But no mention of data trawling or data scraping. Having just discovered ScrapperWiki  the non-numerate Gaberlunzie can see both the serendipitous value to it and its practical use, though he simply can't get his head around how you'd quite request a scraper to work on data and how you might build your own.

But he passionately want to convince Scottish Universities and young livewire journalists that they have to  learn about CAR, SNA and any other data analytical tools that are emerging.

Nightclasses anyone?