Earlier this month I gave a two-day workshop at the University of Zurich together with Stefania Milan called “Doing social and political research in the digital age.” The workshop was organised by the National Center of Competence in Research: Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century for a great group of political science PhD students from all over Switzerland.
Below are the slides from the lecture I gave on the first day of the workshop.
At this year’s Digital Methods Summer School I am coordinating a research project on how journalists use GitHub, together with Jonathan Gray and Stefania Milan. This is part of a broader research collaboration with Erik Borra and Richard Rogers from the Digital Methods Initiative to expand the digital methods repertoire by developing tools and techniques for using code sharing platforms as sources of data for social, political and cultural research.
In the context of journalism GitHub has become an increasingly important platform in the data journalist’s toolkit. In spite of this, not much research has been done so far to understand how journalists use GitHub and how the platform is reconfiguring journalistic practises.
Below are the slides from the talk which introduced the project earlier in the week. Over the coming months I will be working to produce a research report on uses and users of GitHub in the context of journalism. In a second phase the study will be extended to examining the role of code sharing platforms such as GitHub in data activism and open data.
This project is part of a broader research agenda looking at how approaches from digital social research, at the confluence between Internet Studies, Actor-Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS), can be used to study journalism and news production in an age of big data.
On Monday I gave a talk at the great Data Power conference at Sheffield University as part of the data journalism panel. I had the pleasure to share the panel with C.W. Anderson, Jonas Andersson Schwarz, Raul Ferrer Conill and Eddy-Borges Rey.
The talk introduces the data journalism research agenda developed as part of my PhD as well as a paper in progress on networks as storytelling devices in journalism, based on work done for the Tow Center at Columbia University. The paper is a collaboration with Jonathan Gray (University of London, University of Amsterdam) and Tommaso Venturini (Sciences Po, MediaLab).
Below are the slides from my talk and more about this work to come soon.
Yesterday I gave a talk at the Center for Journalism Studies at Ghent University about how Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and digital methods can be used to study and inform data journalism.
I will be using these approaches to study data journalism in my joint PhD with the University of Groningen and the University of Ghent. I will also be exploring the opportunities that these techniques afford for informing data journalism practices in my fellowship at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. The Tow project is called ‘Controversy Mapping for Journalism’ and aims to convene pioneering Science and Technology Studies and digital methods researchers at Sciences Po and the University of Amsterdam with leading journalism scholars, information designers and computer scientists at Columbia University to explore how emerging digital traces, tools and methods can be utilised to transform the coverage of complex issues.
Below are the slides from this talk.
Last month Jonathan Gray and I gave a talk at Columbia University entitled ‘Mapping Issues with the Web: An Introduction to Digital Methods’. We talked about how Bruno Latour’s work on Actor-Network Theory has informed social and cultural research that uses online data and digital methods, with examples from the work of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and of the MediaLab at Sciences Po.
We were very pleased to have Professor Bruno Latour act as a respondent to our talk and join us for the discussion.
We will be building on this work in the coming months as part of our fellowship with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and exploring how these methods, tools and techniques can be made useful to journalists.
Below are the slides from this talk and here is an article on the Tow Center blog that summarises it.
Next week I will be giving a talk at Columbia University in New York together with Jonathan Gray, lead editor of the Data Journalism Handbook. This talk will bring together for the first time two activities that I have been doing in parallel for the past couple of years, namely the work with journalists to develop data literacy at the European Journalism Centre, and the digital methods research work done at the University of Amsterdam.
The talk is hosted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and takes place on the occasion of Bruno Latour‘s visit at Columbia University.
Below is the abstract for the talk:
Mapping Issues with the Web: An Introduction to Digital Methods
How can digital traces be used to understand issues and map controversies? On the occasion of Bruno Latour’s visit to Columbia University, this presentation will show participants how to operationalize his seminal Actor-Network Theory using digital data and methods in the service of social and cultural research.
Participants will be introduced to some of the digital methods and tools developed at the University of Amsterdam and Sciences Po over the past decade and how they have been used to generate insights around a wide variety of topics, from human rights to extremism, global health to climate change.
Please RSVP via Eventbrite.
I recently wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review arguing that data journalists should be more critical and creative in the way they source the data they use for their reportage.
You can read the full post here.
Earlier this month I wrote an article for the London School of Economics Impact of Social Sciences blog about how journalists can use the web and social media as a source of data about the state of issues, debates and information flows in different societies.
You can read the full post here.
In parallel to my work at the European Journalism Centre, for the past couple of years I have been working on and off on a research project that examines sourcing and knowledge production practices in data journalism and how these might be challenging traditional journalism epistemologies. I gave a talk at Stanford University last year about the first part of this study. Thanks to a four-year PhD grant from the University of Groningen and the University of Ghent, I will be able to dedicate more time to this project in the next few years, expand and improve it.
Below is a list of academic papers about data journalism and computational journalism that I collected during my work so far. A few of them, such as Schudson (2010) and Peters (2010) do not directly reference the practice of data journalism but discuss related and relevant developments.
Continue reading “List of Academic Papers about Data Journalism and Computational Journalism”
Earlier this year I gave a talk on data journalism at a conference at Stanford University that focused on the right to information and transparency in the digital age. The talk focused on sourcing practices in data journalism and was based on a research project that I am currently working on. The project examines sourcing practices and knowledge production at the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica, based on interviews with journalists and analysis of data journalism projects.
Below are the slides from my talk.
Continue reading “Sourcing Practices in Data Journalism – Slides from My Talk at Stanford”
