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
CategoryProject Updates
Canners NYC Launches on Gothamist, WNYC
The Brown Institute is proud to announce the launch of the project Canners NYC, an immersive multimedia experience in the world of canners, people who pick up cans and bottles on the streets. Journalist Francesca Berardi spent a year conducting oral history interviews, tracking paths, collecting data, making drawings and occasionally picking cans, in order
Brown and the UN-DESA Stat Division launch Data Storytelling CfP
The Columbia Journalism School’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation in collaboration with UN-DESA’s Statistics Division is pleased to announce a call for project proposals on data storytelling, aimed at nurturing new collaborations between national statistics systems (NSSs), including national statistical offices (NSOs), and journalism outlets. Proposals are due 20 July 2018, and winners will be
DataShare, Explained
Reporting and breaking the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations required a centralized platform that made it possible for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ to collaborate while exploring tens of millions of files. As successful as these probes proved, the platform failed to make a searchable database that connected data stored in individual reporters’ computers. Supported by a 2017-18 Magic Grant
Reporting from Rwanda
Francesco Fiondella, principle investigator of the Data Interrupted Magic Grant, has spent the past week in Rwanda, collecting artifacts, conducting interviews, and reporting on data loss in the country due to the 1994 conflict. Fracesco has spent the week digging through archives, unearthing unlogged weather data that might help strengthen existing climate models. He has interviewed
Dark Inquiry Launches Bail Bloc Project
The Brown Institute announces the launch of the latest project from the Dark Inquiry Magic Grant team. Bail Bloc starts with the premise that cash bail streamlines mass incarceration by preventing low-income, usually people of color, from exercising their right to a fair trial. The team writes that “prosecutors and judges work in concert to coerce low-income people
Measure for Measure at The Public Theater
Elevator Repair Service, the Obie-winning company behind Gatz — “the most remarkable achievement in theater of this decade” (The New York Times) — returns to The Public to celebrate their 25th season with a dynamic new production of Shakespeare’s MEASURE FOR MEASURE. With athletic theatricality and Marx-Brothers-inspired slapstick, the ERS ensemble brings exciting new life to this story of impossible moral choices in
Watch ‘Experiencing Racism in VR’ at TEDxRVA
Psychologist Courtney D. Cogburn focuses her work on how racism contributes to racial inequalities in health. With support from a Magic Grant through the Brown Institute, Courtney and a team of researchers at Columbia and Stanford University have been using virtual reality to help people experience the complexities of racism to not only encourage them
1000 Cut’s member on VR and Social Change
Stanford University faculty and 1000 Cut Magic Grant member Prof. Jeremy Bailenson was recently among those cited and quoted in an August 1 USA Today Article entitled “New breed of VR pushes for social change.” The article examines how this emerging platform is being used as an instrument for letting participants examine their conceptions of