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By Alex Calderwood Brown Institute fellow Derek Kravitz and New York Times correspondent Richard Fausset published a story yesterday that detailed why New Orleans officials went ahead with Mardi Gras, despite the growing worries at the time regarding COVID-19. The story, published in The Times as “Why New Orleans Pushed Ahead With Mardi Gras, Even

By Alex Calderwood. Over the weekend, The Brown Institute’s Creative Technologist Ziv Schneider hosted a two-day Immersive Storytelling workshop, introducing a room full of journalists and new media artists to photogrammetry and virtual reality. Ziv began the day on Saturday exhibiting technologies that are used to digitally render the physical world in 3D, from infrared

One of the brilliant aspects of the Brown Institute’s design is our quarterly “all hands” meetings. Every few months, the Magic Grantees, fellows and staff from the Stanford and Columbia sides of the institute come together to share the progress they’ve made on their projects. The venue alternates — California, New York, California, New York… 

Who exactly is running the federal government? To answer this question, ProPublica launched Trump Town, the only public collection of data on the Trump administration’s current and former appointees. Since its launch, Trump Town has experienced heavy usage from journalists, D.C. staffers, and even members of the government, who don’t maintain a similar list of

By Bernat Ivancsics and Bhaskar Ghosh Yesterday, The New York Times’ R&D team, in collaboration with IBM Garage, released the initial findings of The News Provenance Project (NPP), which began in July. The project is an attempt to curb the growing threat of misinformation by making the sources and origin (i.e. provenance) of journalistic content

Nigeria’s estimated 58,000 maternal deaths account for a staggering 19% of the world’s annual total — a statistic from a country that represents just 2.6% of the world’s population. Mobile blood banks, free health care for mothers and newborns in some Nigerian states, and community health care centers in underserved regions have led to noticeable

As we move into 2020, we thought we would take a moment to reflect on both our struggles and success of 2019. From our new staff additions Ziv Schneider and Alex Calderwood, to project launches (below), to new partnerships, Brown has had a big year! Premiers and Launches This year we saw yet another batch

Alberto Cairo is an associate professor and Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the University of Miami. He recorded this interview with Alex Calderwood before delivering a lecture about his recently released book How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information. What spurred you to write this book? Have you been thinking about it for

We are pleased to announce that the team behind 1000 Cut Journey, which was awarded our 2018-19 Flagship Magic Grant, has partnered with acclaimed visual studio iNK Stories, to expand their Virtual Reality (VR) experience. The project is a bi-coastal initiative between Professor Courtney Cogburn’s research group at the Columbia University School of Social Work