The Data Culture Group builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. 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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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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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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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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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...
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Understanding the 2020 “Racial Reckoning” In the Media Just over two years ago, on May 25th, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The shocking video of the incident quickly circulated across the internet through social media. Mr. Floyd’s murder sparked countless protests across the country and globe ...
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Upcoming Talk at C+J'22 Conference: News as Data for Activists I’ll be speaking at the 2022 Computation + Journalism conference, hosted at Columbia University from June 9-11. I’ll be presenting a paper on the software architecture supporting the Data Against Feminicide project.
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ICA'22 Poster: Politicization and Polarization of Pandemic News Coverage I’m excited to join a large team of Northeastern collaborators to present ongoing work at the International Communication Association 2022 Conference. I supported the data acquisiton and analysis pieces of this work by Larissa Doroshenko, Ryan Gallagher, Shreya Singh, and Brook Foucault...
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Finding Tweets in Online News The use of embedded content from Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms has grown to become a norm in online news content. When these platforms emerged journalists employed existing industry norms to treat them like traditional sources - content that needed verification, vetting,...
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A Portable Electic Warming Blanket My brother-in-law Alex has been in a wheelchair since an accident a few years ago. Being tinkerers, we’ve had fun brainstorming assistive technologies that might fill various needs that have come up for him. Early on this involved digging into products that exist already, but more recen...
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Advocating for Food Security with a Data Sculpture The pandemic has affected so many aspects of our lives, amplifying disparities and challenges that already existed. For far too many households simply having access to enough food to eat is a daily challenge. During the early months of the COVID pandemic, an average of 1,659 new househo...
