By revealing the mechanisms behind previously opaque advertising schemes at an arbitrarily detailed level, the Web Transparency project unveils today’s commercial and political tactics that are used to funnel consumers and citizens’ attention. The Web Transparency team consists of Charles Berret, a PhD candidate in communications at Columbia University, Cecilia Reyes, an undergraduate in computer science at

A Columbia School of Journalism documentary film student and a PhD candidate in the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information will tell the story of a drag renaissance taking place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that is enlisting and extending social media platforms for the “identity curation” that happens in the drag community. The Team

CityBeat is multi-platform application for newsrooms and journalists that sources, monitors and analyzes hyper-local information from multiple social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare, in real time. We use public, geo-tagged, real time data shared via social media services, in order to trace a city’s happenings and dynamics. During the first year of

A partnership between faculty and students in the Departments of History, Statistics and Computer Science at Columbia University, this project will probe the limits of official secrecy by applying natural language processing software to archives of declassified documents to examine whether it is possible to predict the contents of redacted text, attribute authorship to anonymous documents and model the geographic and temporal patterns

A team of graduate students and recent graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism and the School of Engineering and Applied Science will create a system for tracking censorship in authoritarian regimes post-publication (i.e. when a story is revised or deleted after publication).  The team will create real-time assessments and monthly reports of journalistic improprieties around the globe. The Team