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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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...
