The Data Culture Group builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. Our work generally fall into the categories of applied computational journalism or creative data representation. Led by Professor Rahul Bhargava, we are a part of the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University.
Recent Blog Posts
We think out loud, sharing our process and research via blog posts. Consider our blog as our open notebook, full of sketches and under-construction ideas.
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Nebraska Data Art Jam: Beyond Visualization I’m just back from delivering the keynote talk at the Data Storytelling Workshop and Data Art Jam, which brought together a fascinating mix of creative thinkers, from scientists to journalists to artists. Hosted by Dan Novy at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, this inter...
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Journalism papers at IEEE Vis 2024: selected highlights IEEE Vis is the premiere global academic computation-focused visualization conference. Each year about a thousand people attend, presenting around 100 papers. Some of those touch on data visualization and storytelling in journalism settings, bringing deep technical thinking and research...
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Talk Summary: Dr. Vishwanath on Science Communication & Misinformation Notes from a talk By Vish Vishwanath (Harvard School of Public Health; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), hosted by David Lazar and the Internet Democracy Initiative, December 18, 2024.
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Reflections on 'UN Human Security in the AI Era' Event I was honored to attend and speak at a recent UN event about how AI might be reshaping the contours of human security: Human Security at 30: New Security and Development Horizons in the Artificial Intelligence Age (hosted by the UN Human Development Report Office). It was fascinating to...
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Sculpting Data with Clay – A New Take on Data Physicalization I’m a big fan of sculptural forms of data, particularly because I think they offer novel opportunities to think harder about the material as an interface to, and representation of, the data. Two projects have popped onto my radar while researching for my forthcoming Community Data book,...
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AI-Powered Content Audits for Local News Organizations across the news industry are exploring ways to use generative AI to support their storytelling (many shared on this very blog). A growing trend is to use these new tools on the other end of the production cycle, to support content audits that assess a large set of stories ...
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Computation + Journalism 2024 Symposium wrap-up We recently co-hosted the Computation + Journalism Symposium 2024 at Northeastern, bringing together academics, journalists, data scientists, editors, and more to explore innovate work at the intersection of fields. Keynotes from Julia Angwin, Aaron Sankin, and Alan Mislove.
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Pre-print: Comparing Author Extraction Libraries How effective are existing tools for extracting author information from global online news? Author extracton is a key task in media research that supports a number of different types of research questions. We’ve hesitated to support this broadly in Media Cloud, because our past evaluati...
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Your Early Fall AI+Journalism Updates Welcome back from the summer. So much has happened at the intersection of AI and journalism while you’ve been at the beach. Here’s my latest summary of what caught my attention.
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Pre-print: Testing Generative AI for Source Audits in Student-Produced Local News We recently shared new work at the AEJMC 2024 conference on prototyping an AI-assisted audit of gender representation via quotes in The Scope. We’ve published it as an under-construction pre-print to share the work and find related research to collaborate with.
