ScienceFlows in the I International Congress on Data Journalism

LORENA CANO ORÓN// What stand do political parties take towards non-conventional therapies? And what stance was taken on Twitter during the election campaign of the 2015 General Elections? Lorena Cano and Carolina Moreno presented on February 26 at the First International Conference on Data Journalism: New Narratives for Specialised Journalism, held at the UMA, a research that aimed to assess and study the treatment of non-conventional, complementary, alternatives or integrative therapies through electoral programmes of the 2015 General Elections of five political parties: Ciudadanos, Podemos, PP, PSOE and Unidad Popular, as well as the tweets of their leading candidates

The researchers have used a double methodological technique. First, to study the electoral programs, they used registration forms to analyse their content. As an anecdote, the authors explained that some of the electoral programs were published on the Internet in PDF, in image format, being impossible to perform any kind of computer analysis about them, not even a simple search for words. This data was also discussed throughout the congress, making reference to the need for transparency and accessibility to public data.

Second, to analyse the tweets, they applied the linguistic corpus analysis software T-LAB 9.1. This program, acquired by the ScienceFlows research group, was the one used to perform keyword co-occurrence analyses, which was the technique chosen to evaluate the digital corpus.
The main results of the research show that very few references are made to this type of therapies. Unidad Popular and Ciudadanos propose that they do not be a part of the SNS service portfolio, while the PSOE proposes to regulate them for those people who wish to use them. The rest of the parties do not take a stance in this regard.

The congress, which was held at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the University of Malaga, was organised by the In-Data research group, led by Montserrat Quesada (Professor of Journalism, UPF) and which brings together nine researchers from different universities and institutions. The best specialists in international data journalism participated in the program, such as Stephen Doig, Mar Cabra, Daniele Grasso, Aron Pilhofer, Paula Guisado, Eva Domínguez and Antonio Delgado…). The director of the congress, Elena Blanco, highlighted the particularity of this event in which the most practical version of data journalism had been combined with the brilliant contributions of professionals in the sector and its academic side. In its closing she did not dismiss to host a second edition, after the success of the present one.