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February 2019
Queer & “Here”
Queer & "Here" From hookup apps to investigative reporting, community-building to historical archiving, the Internet has transformed queer experience and visibility. What have these changes wrought? What gains? What losses? In a free-wheeling and frank conversation, Zach Stafford, editor-in-chief of the U.S.’s oldest LGBTQ news magazine, The Advocate, and Jack Halberstam, queer scholar and professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University, will consider the roles the digital realm has played in queer communities, how it has made space…
Find out more »March 2019
Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics
Abstract: In 1915, the Chicago City Council asked statistician Edith Abbott to report “upon the frequency of murder, assault, burglary, robbery, theft and like crimes in Chicago." Her report, drawing on published and unpublished statistics from the courts, probation office, house of correction, and police department, set the stage for subsequent collections and evaluations of crime statistics. Her conclusions---that statistics' quality depend on the systems of data collection and that multiple sources of data are needed to study crime---hold today.…
Find out more »May 2019
Book Launch of Habeas Data by tech reporter Cyrus Farivar in conversation with Alex Abdo, Knight First Amendment Institute
Join award-winning tech reporter Cyrus Farivar for a book launch of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech. Farivar will be joined by Alex Abdo, Litigation Director for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who will respond to the book and moderate conversation on the topic of data and privacy. You are being watched. Whether through your phone or your car or your credit card, caught on a CCTV camera or tracked through your online viewing…
Find out more »Brown Institute Welcomes Technology Journalist Kara Swisher
Brown welcomes technology journalist Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode and a contributing writer to The New York Times Opinion Section. She previously wrote for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and served as co-executive editor of All Things Digital. Kara will discuss the state of the technology industry and will share her perspective on media trends with Brown Director Maneesh Agrawala. Thursday, May 2, 20196:30 pmMcCaw Hall, Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center 326 Galvez St, Stanford, CA 94305 Registration link: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4Hp4pVNx0oE0KkR
Find out more »September 2019
A Science-Media Meetup for Climate Stories With Impact
The climate crisis poses a unique challenge to journalism. It touches every part of society, from politics and business to sports and culture, yet in many situations, we barely mention it. Journalists can help to change this. There is a climate story for every beat: Facebook’s new server farms are being built in the Arctic, not the desert, as the company anticipates rising temperatures; Wine regions are shifting around the world; Qualifying events for the Tokyo Olympics this summer were…
Find out more »October 2019
Lanzamiento de Democracy Fighters
El Brown Institute for Media Innovation, el Comité de Protección a Periodistas, Artículo 19, y Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl cordialmente te invitan al lanzamiento de Democracy Fighters, un archivo viviente. Esta plataforma es un archivo digital que agrega y conserva los trabajos de los periodistas asesinados en México. Desde el año 2000, han sido asesinados 111 periodistas y trabajadores de medios, convirtiendo a México en uno de los países más letales para ejercer el periodismo, según el Comité de Protección a…
Find out more »The Quest for Balance: Technology, Innovation and the Public Good in Higher Education
Talk and discussion with Dr. Jonelle Bradshaw de Hernandez, Ph.D. Executive Director of Foundation Relations and researcher at The University of Texas at Austin. Technical skills are paramount to succeed in the modern labor market – but the question remains, what are the attributes and skills needed to make an impact on the social good? Who determines this and who decides and how does this impact vulnerable students in the U.S.? My first aim is to examine how well our…
Find out more »How Charts Lie – A Talk by Alberto Cairo
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Charts, infographics, and diagrams are ubiquitous. They are useful because they can reveal patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. Good charts make us smarter—if we know how to read them. However, they can also deceive us. Charts lie in a variety of ways—displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty—…
Find out more »February 2020
Brown Speaker Series featuring Sean Rameswaram, Host of Vox’s Today, Explained
The Brown Institute is excited to welcome Sean Rameswaram, host of Today, Explained, Vox’s daily explainer podcast. As advertised by Vox, Today, Explained is your all killer, no filler, Monday to Friday news. Sean, a veteran of the podcast space, will discuss Vox’s novel approach to their daily show and will join Brown Institute Director Maneesh Agrawala in conversation about the state of podcasts. Before joining Vox to host its daily news podcast, Sean was a correspondent for Radiolab's More…
Find out more »The Green New Deal: Shaping A Public Imagination with Kim Stanley Robinson
Can climate fiction help overcome political friction? When climate change is the focus of both fiction and nonfiction, dystopia tends to rule. It’s not hard to see why, given that 30 years of efforts to push past fossil fuels have barely shifted the global energy mix and impacts on humans and nature mount as vulnerable communities encounter off-the-charts climate extremes. A notable exception is the prize-winning work of Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the planet’s most lauded living novelists of…
Find out more »October 2020
Local Time: A Challenge for Visualization with Johanna Drucker, UCLA
Each year, the Brown Institute sponsors talks that explore the intersection between media and technology. This year we have three virtual presentations lined up, each challenging us to think about data and computation in new ways. Each talk is by researchers outside of journalism, and yet we have a great deal to learn from their approaches to data and computation. Local Time: A Challenge for Visualization Register The term “local” usually suggests a specific geographical spot, but it also has…
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