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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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.
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Grant to support AI monitoring of news for human rights violations So excited to announce that we’ve received a grant to support our work on the Counterdata Network from the Data Empowerment Fund. Our project builds on a powerful legacy—think of Ida B. Wells using news to expose lynchings in the late 1800s. Today, we’re continuing this tradition by dev...
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Media Cloud Receives Major NSF Grant! We’re thrilled to announce that Media Cloud has secured new NSF HNDS-I grant to take our global news archive and director to the next level! This grant enables us to extend and enhance our searchable news database, which currently includes nearly 2 billion documents. With this funding, ...
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Data Theatre Collaborative wins Heart of CommUNITY Award Excited to share that the Data Theatre Collaborative won a “Heart of CommUNITY” award from Northeastern University for our work with Livable Streets Alliance and Hyde Park Task Force youth.
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Creative Data Representation for Social Justice Movements @ csv,conf,v8 I attended csv,conf,v8 in Puebla, Mexico, where I presented a talk on creative approaches to data representation that are more appropriately designed for social justice movemements. This connects to idea in my forthcoming book on “Community Data”. The group was an incredibly kind and we...
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New Strategies for Using Artificial Intelligence in Journalism Here’s the fifth in my series of round-ups on the latest in artificial intelligence and journalism. This time around it feels like the rubber has really hit the road, with lots of work on strategies and examples being shared around the web.
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Guest on Schwabish's PolicyViz Podcast: Data Beyond the Screen I was so pleased to be invited by my friend and colleague Jon Schwabish for an interview on his PolicyViz Podcast. The topic was “Data Beyond the Screen”, specifically focused on data sculptures. Watch a video of interview.
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How can AI help us study the news? Here are my experiments with LLM-based query generation. To understand politics, economics, events and health communication in the news, researchers study large sets of articles from online news sources. Media Cloud, a project that I co-lead, holds a historical archive of over 1.5 billion stories from over 100,000 sources and has been used to...
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Spring updates on artificial intelligence and journalism Here’s the fourth in my series of round-ups on the latest in artificial intelligence and journalism. Budding uses of AI in newsrooms
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New Paper about data theatre in Arts Excited to share a new paper published by the Data Theatre Collaborative in Arts: Viewpoints/Points of View: Building a Transdisciplinary Data Theatre Collaboration in Six Scenes. Instead of a traditional academic paper, we chose to write up our study as a six-scene script, aiming to c...
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Your start of the year updates on artificial intelligence in journalism are here This is third in my series of round-ups on the latest in artificial intelligence and journalism. Here are some recent links you might want to read.
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Keynote at Information is Beautiful 2023 Awards I was honored to be invited to give a keynote at the 2023 Information is Beautiful Awards - Day of Inspiration, hosted by the Data Visualization Society. In the talk, called “Questioning Our Data Cultures” I decided to introduce some ideas from the book I’m working on, specifically abou...
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Creative Data Viz as Epistemological Resistance (AoIR 2023 talk) I attended the Association of Internet Researchers 2023 conference last week in Philadelphia, where I presented my research on rethinking how we represent data in social justice and community settings. Read the short paper.
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Here are the updates you need on artificial intelligence in journalism I’m continuing my series of round-ups on artificial intelligence and journalism. Here are some recent links you might want to read.
- Here are the latest updates on artificial intelligence in journalism
It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere in the news, particularly in digital journalism circles. I’m keeping an eye on ongoing developments and will share an occasional round-up of links that might be relevant to you. Here’s what was happening in the last few weeks.
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A New Tool To Help Understand Partisan News in the US The latest Zelda game is being covered a lot more in Democrat-serving online news sites. That’s one of the first random tidbits I noticed in “On Our Own Terms”, a new tool built by Claire Pan and I as part of the Media Could project.
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Teaching Physical Computing with Mini-Mini Golf 🤖⛳️🎉 My family knows one thing about vacationing with me: if we’re anywhere near a mini-golf course we’ll have to stop and play it. Waterfalls, windmills, pirates, animals — I love it all. This semester I was teaching Physical Computing course again, and I wondered… could I combine my love o...
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Data journalism? You can do it. Data is still hot, but the new skills, math, and technologies can feel overwhelming. In my experience journalism students and professionals approach learning data journalism with both excitement and trepidation. However, over a decade of teaching data literacy to many types of learners ...
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Digital Storytelling to Support Connective Journalism Journalism serves many roles in society - informative, investigative, normative, and more. As the tools and pratices of interactive digital storytelling continue to grow, how can they help the connective role journalism plays in society? Read on for some background and a recent experim...
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New Paper: Taking Data Feminism to School Excited to share a new paper out in the British Journal of Educational Technology. I worked with collaborators to assess what data feminism looks like in K-12 data science education. We retrospectively review 42 youth data programs and projects, assessing each against the key principles...
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Upcoming AMC FAccT Talk: Towards Intersectional Feminist and Participatory ML We’ll be presenting our collaborative work on the Data Against Feminicide project at the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. We’re very excited to put forward this work as a case study in intersectional feminist and participatory approaches to machine learn...
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Upcoming talk at PaCSS'22: Partisan Media Coverage and Intersectionality I’ll be speaking at the 2022 Politics and Computational Social Science conference today with my colleague Meg Heckman. We’ll be presenting work, with Emily Boardman Ndulue, that took an intersectional lens to analyzing how online news media covered the election of current US Vice Presid...
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Helping Computers Find Food in Text Computers are good at processing large amounts of information, but bad at intuiting what that information actually is. For an ongoing research project looking at mentions of food in online media, we’re trying to help computers get better at recognizing entities in unstructured text. Giv...
