Dave Gehring and Sam Parnell, CEO and CTO of Distributed Media Labs, explain how they hope to give publishers the opportunity to grow audience and deepen engagement across the open web through a new platform and information architecture that enables a standard for content distribution across the web. (Illustration: thanks to Stanford DCI Fellow Joseph
Jeff Larson introduces The Markup
Jeff Larson, Managing Editor of The Markup, explains how this new nonprofit news start-up plans to investigate how powerful institutions are using technology in ways that impact people and society. “Whether that is reshaping the news we get and what we believe; how elections play out; our jobs and how we get them; how we
Tonight at Brown at Columbia! Washington Post & NPR Discuss Voice Interfaces for Journalism
Tonight’s the night! We have our second Transparency Series event, this time on Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). VUIs also go by the more familiar names “personal assistants” or “smart speakers” — Think Siri, Alexa, Cortana or Google Assistant. This should be an exciting event! Voice platforms are still young enough that journalists can have a
The NYT’s Kevin Quealy on Innovating with Data & Graphics
Kevin Quealy discusses how The New York Times thinks about data visualization and graphics. Quealy is the Deputy Editor at The Upshot, the Times’s site on politics, economics, and everyday life. The goal of The Upshot, he says, is to use data and graphics effectively and “turn readers into experts.”
‘Hacking Voter Suppression’ Project Begins
For the 2018-19 Magic Grant Season, the Brown Institute at Columbia is funding Hacking Voter Suppression, a project by Columbia Journalism School Professor June Cross and Charlotte Braithwaite, a Theater Director and Assistant Professor of Music and Theater Arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project seeks to explore how foreign interference, gerrymandering, and
Twitch 4 News? The Washington Post’s Phoebe Connelly tells us more
Washington Post Deputy Video Editor Phoebe Connelly joined Twitch’s Cody Conners to explain how the paper is using the live- streaming platform for news. Testing the concept of a “Post Twitch channel” with Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress, the Post discovered that Twitch – typically frequented by video-gamers – provides an interesting space for analysis
Rethinking Tech, Ethics, and Democracy with MIT Tech Review’s Gideon Lichfield
In this conversation, Gideon Lichfield, Editor-in-Chief is the MIT Technology Review, explores issues raised in the Review’s fall issue: “Technology is threatening our democracy: How do we save it?” Lichfield also unpacks the Review’s new mission statement: “To bring about better informed and more conscious decisions about technology … we think it is no longer
Whither VR? Kate Parsons and Ben Vance
Video artist Kate Parsons and VR veteran Ben Vance talk about innovations in VR and their work with FLOAT, a collaborative entity that focuses on the intersection of art, interactivity, and virtual reality. Based in Los Angeles, Parsons and Vance work together to create evocative, nuanced art experiences. Their work has been shown nationally and
NYT & FiveThirtyEight Talk Election Polls at Brown
On October 12 & 13, the Brown Institute kicked off its 2018-2019 Transparency Series with a deep dive into polling and election polls. The event commenced with a seminar by Amanda Cox, editor of The Upshot at The New York Times. In response to polling results from the 2016 election combined with a lack of