Both halves of the Brown Institute met at Columbia University for its quarterly “All Hands” meeting. It was a day of presentations and discussions. A full house, with grants and fellows form both 2012-13 and 2013-14.
Year Zero
From the Nieman Journalism Lab Blog: “The journalism unicorn exists. I’ve seen one — even worked with one. Maybe you know the kind: a journalist who’s as nimble and dynamic as a reporter as she is with coding.” The Brown Institute is collaborating on a post-bacc program to help prepare journalists for the J-School’s Dual Degree
The Declassification Engine in Poynter
Poynter has just posted a fantastic writeup of one of this year’s Magic Grants, the Declassification Engine. Co-funded by the Tow Center for digital Journalism, the Declassification Engine will “create a critical mass of declassified documents by aggregating all the archives that are now just scattered online” and apply machine learning techniques to “reveal patterns in official
Robust detection of hyper-local events from geotagged social media data
Architecture of our local event detection system. Including data collector, time-series builder, Gaussian Process regression model, alert engine and classifier. Arrows indicate input and output flow of each module. Authors Xie K., Xia C., Grinberg N., Schwartz R., and Naaman M. Abstract An increasing number of location-annotated content available from social media channels like Twitter,
Brown Fellow Iubel joins ONA13 Student Newsroom
The Online News Association announced the members of its ONA13 Student Newsroom. Over 100 students applied from around the world, and Brown Fellow Nikolas Iubel was one of the 38 selected. The winners will provide intensive coverage of the Online News Association Conference & Awards Banquet, October 17-20 in Atlanta. This group will be mentored by distinguished
Steve Lohr named 2013-2014 Brown Fellow
Steve Lohr was a graduate of the School of Journalism in 1975 and now reports on technology, business and economics for the New York Times. In 2013, he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for its reporting on Apple and other technology firms “that illustrates the darker side of a changing global
Making Sense of Cities Using Social Media: Requirements for Hyper-Local Data Aggregation Tools
Examples of geo-tagged social media data visualizations mockups. Clockwise: geo-tagged topic groupings, keywords appearance graphs, volume graph and heat map Authors Schwartz, R., Naaman M., Matni, Z. Abstract As more people tweet, check-in and share pictures and videos of their daily experiences in the city, new opportunities arise to understand urban activity. When aggregated, these
Hansen’s “Data-Driven Aesthetics” in the NYT
From a speedometer to a weather map to a stock chart, we routinely interpret and act on data displayed visually. With a few exceptions, data has no natural “look,” no natural “visualization,” and choices have to be made about how it should be displayed. Each choice can reveal certain kinds of patterns in the data
‘Magic Grants’ awards announced!
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation has awarded seed funding to teams of students, post-docs and faculty from Stanford and Columbia universities to develop new technologies that could transform the ways media content is produced, delivered and consumed. The winning projects include a natural language processor that detects media bias, an experiment in augmenting stories with virtual