Usos e apropriações de tecnologias no cotidiano do jornalismo guiado por dados

Abstract

This dissertation looks at how journalism professionals, through everyday practices, appropriate artifacts and computational technologies to work with Data-Driven Journalism and, specifically, with data visualization. For this, we considered that it is in everyday life that technologies are appropriated for those who make use of them, and that this use leads technologies to a closure or stabilization, in which they are no longer perceived as a foreign element. We also consider the way people make use of artifacts as elements that construct identities. The main study subjects are six professionals that make use of artifacts and techniques related to Data-Driven Journalism in their everyday life. Through interviews and observations, we collected some ways through which people appropriate technology, and thus takes them to stabilization and build identities. The analysis of everyday practices would collaborate to a less instrumentalist approach in artifact design and technique teaching, thus legitimating the ways each person makes use of technologies. For a better understanding of those everyday practices, the concepts of "tactics" and "strategies" are introduced, in order to situate the everyday power relations and how people can subvert them, as well as concepts from the Science, Technology and Society studies – STS –, such as SCOT – social construction of technology – and technical codes, in order to analyze the processes that lead to the closure of technology. Relating these concepts to journalism, the neutral connotation of large data sets is analyzed and compared to the idea of technology neutrality. Data-Driven Journalism is then related to some taxonomies of journalistic genres and formats, and a brief history of computer use in journalism is presented to situate it within journalism and how journalism’s identities are constructed through technology consumed in daily life. In turn, is presented how journalistic products derived from large databases propose another type of relationship between journalism and the public, specifically through data visualization. We describe some possibilities of visualization as a way to explore and/or communicate large data sets, as well as some different ways of reading they provide. We also describe some processes and tools for producing data visualization in journalism, as well as some software tools used in Data-Driven Journalism. The major conclusion of this study is that legitimating tactics, as well as a less instrumentalist and determinist approach to computing and other technologies, would help more people in making use of the artifacts and techniques of Data-Driven Journalism and data visualization.