I decided to follow the proceedings of a hi-jacked Ethiopian airlines flight. As this is still a developing story, more content is still being added to the timeline.
This story was slightly more difficult to do. This is because most of the content was being curated from online sources. FlightRadar a plane spotting tool also came in handy as I was able to follow the progress of the hi-jacking. I decided to do the story in the form of a timeline.
Please see the link here. Unable to insert html.
I covered Tricia Wang’s lunch talk at the Berkman Center. I constructed the story over Storify and the it can be found here.
Tracking gun killings in the United States: an audio and visual essay
For this assignment I wanted to use audio, a medium that I am trying to learn. I had heard about the recent local story of the 9-year-old boy who had been shot and killed by his brother. I was looking to tie that into the larger national story about gun violence which is a subject that I have written a lot about and am researching for my Nieman project.
I wanted to provide information about how journalists and others have been trying to do the difficult work of gathering basic data about shootings. I had been following the Slate project.
Got the assignment completed on deadline but had some issues with loading soundcloud track onto wordpress.
On Friday morning, a group of children gathered to celebrate the final day of the Chinese New Year. A reporter with little photographic skills, no audio collection abilities at all and only a passing familiarity with powerpoint was there to document the event.
Imagining I was working with another journalist who’d put together a story on mining in Latin America, I set out to build an interactive map in four hours (7-11pm, February 16th, 2014.) that could accompany that piece. I wanted to see how long it would take me, on a deadline, to make this kind of thing. And I’m pretty happy with the result. With another four hours it could be ready for prime time.
The results can be explored by clicking here:
Challenges
Was this journalism? I felt for the coders and developers at ProPublica, NYTimes, Boston Globe, etc. Did they run into existential questions about whether they were actually doing journalism versus just making pretty things? Does the demand for interactivity from the Internet readership mean more resources are being diverted to building these kind of things rather than actual reporting?
Finding the right images Did I want to tell the story with aerial shots from Google Maps or on-the-ground photography? Which was best to show the immensity of these open pit mines?
What to write for the blurbs The 70 word budget I had for each interactive slide was extremely limited. What did I have to leave out?
Coding, coding, coding The javascript for this basic interactive map was not (overly) difficult, but making the thing look pretty with CSS was time-consuming. Still not happy with it.
Only made 4 of 10. My top 10 list is six short. Too much time was wasted cropping images, debugging code and researching the blurbs. Had I access to in-house resources–like a journalist’s database with the latest stats and newspegs on each mine–I’d have been golden.
Tools
Leaflet is a Javascript library whose inventor was recently hired by the folks at MapBox. It’s streamlined mapping and allows for tons of customization.
At the Association for the Advancement of Science conference—a general science meeting taking place in Chicago this week—psychologist Eli Finkel from Northwestern University delivered a talk about how marriage has changed over time. He was mainly focused on debunking the notion that people expect more from marriage now than they ever have. “It’s not about more or less,” he said. “It’s about where you are in Maslow’s hierarchy.”
Finkel used psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous theory about the “hierarchy of needs” to explain how marriage has evolved. Pre-industrialization, pairing off was a pragmatic endeavor. “What people looked for at that time from marriage was ability to achieve things like food production,” he said. Marriage satisfied basic needs, such as safety and hunger, at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy.
As Americans began to move from farms to cities, their marriages moved up the hierarchy of needs. Now that basic requirements were met, the “companionate marriage” became more common: people could think about linking up for love and belonging.
In 1960s, the birth control pill emerged and civil rights movements brewed. There were a “slew of countercultural revolutions” and increasingly, people began to look to marriage as a mechanism for personal growth. Finkel quoted the sociologist Robert N. Bellah: love is “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves.” Through marriage, said Finkel, “All of us want to become our own unique special butterfly… We want to discover who it is we are and become the best version of ourselves.”
To illustrate Finkel’s talk, I used Venngage to make this infographic. (You need to click through to see the full picture.) It took me less than three hours to watch the talk and produce the infographic. Venngage was very efficient but I only realized after using the service that you must subscribe in order to properly export whatever image you create.
P.S: You can read more about Finkel’s research on marriage in this recent New York Times piece.
When Biohacking Meets Art
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ2uB5xHQRM&feature=youtu.be
Behind the Story: GoPro and Remote Reporting
This piece represents a reporting experiment, and though we weren’t able to get as much together in four hours as I had hoped, this was a proof of concept of remote reporting with the latest GoPro camera.
GoPro’s Hero3+ camera can stream live high-quality video to a smartphone app, and the camera’s features can all be controlled remotely. So yeah, we strapped the camera to Primavera’s head, and I sat in the next room essentially looking through her eyes and deciding when to record or not as she worked on a biohacking project she’s in the middle of. A picture below shows a screen grab from my iPhone during the recording.
I watched them work for a little over an hour, recording about 20 minutes of footage total. Then I recorded short audio interviews with Primavera and with a scientist she was collaborating with. The narration is an edited version of that interview with Primavera, and I didn’t have time to edit in any of the other interview.
We had two major issues I hadn’t accounted for:
* Slow rendering time: GoPro was designed to capture high-quality footage of high-action scenes. It can record in 1080p resolution, which is overkill for this project. I set it for 960p, but I should have dialed it down further, since the high-res footage created two problems. One, the file sizes were immense. We generated about 15 gigs of raw video. The files were slow to transfer from camera to the computer, so time was lost simply waiting for that. And then when I brought the files into FinalCutPro, the program had to render them, which was also time consuming. This meant I had far less time to pick and choose clips and fine-tune the piece to meet our four-hour deadline. I probably should have used GoPro Studio, free software that comes with the camera, but I wasn’t familiar with it so I went with a program I know better.
* Light issues: We started our project at around 2:30 pm, and the light was excellent then. The building we were shooting in has skylights, so it was pretty ideal. But by 4:30 the light was getting dim. Things still looked fine in the viewfinder and on the app, but once we imported the footage, everything after 4:30 looked so dark you can hardly tell what is happening. We had to scrap most of that footage, and the short clip that is in here looks like we switched to black-and-white.
Bigger Issues
My theory on this is that subjects of a story might feel less self-conscious about having a reporter’s camera present if the reporter wasn’t in the room. That theory was totally wrong. All three of the people involved in this biohacking project were frequently thinking about whether the camera was getting things, and they spent time handing the camera off to each other, trying to get the camera to look through the microscope’s viewfinder, etc. Because as the reporter I wasn’t able to decide where the camera was positioned, this was really a story co-created with the subjects. I did the editing and made decisions about what to put in and what to leave out, but I only had footage that the subjects had decided to take (with some general instructions by me at the outset).
There may be a few situations where it is simply too dangerous for a reporter to tag along, but where subjects are willing to carry a GoPro. But that’s probably a rare case (I’d be curious to hear what others think, though).
For me, this fits into a broader project on having subjects make multimedia diaries of their lives, and it seems like Google Glass is better suited for that (less invasive to the wearer). Still, the GoPro is an interesting new tool.
William’s Four-Hour Challenge
Saturday, February 15, 11:57pm
Sidney Pacific (S-P) Graduate Residence, a graduate dorm at MIT with 700 graduate students, hosted Open Doors Night on Saturday, February 15 from 8pm to 11pm. During Open Doors Night, several residents host small parties in their apartments and residents go around from room to room, meeting new people and enjoying snacks, hors d’oeuvres, and desserts.
I decided to make Open Doors Night my four-hour challenge and tell the story in the style of “Humans of New York“, a blog that features photos and quotes from New Yorkers in their daily lives. Here are the 15 hosts, what they served, and what they said.
Katie (and Georgia)
ebelskivers
“It’s a family tradition!”
———-
Erin
chocolate and plain croissants, teriyaki pork, lamb
“Why do you enjoy cooking?”
“It’s like the PhD grind, but you can eat it immediately!”
———-
Atul and Pawan
aloo paratha, laddu
“It’s an opportunity to expose people to Indian food and Indian traditions.”
———-
Stephanie and Jen
pinwheels (cheddar & bacon, spinach & mushrooms), sushi (spam & pineapple, crab meat & cucumber, salmon & cucumber), salted caramel turtle cookies
“This is my fifth time hosting Open Doors Night!”
“We thought we were going to be lazy but ended up doing a lot!”
———-
Mariana
canapés, hummus, tabbouleh salad, tomato bites
“I got this book [on Lebanese cuisine] for Christmas.”
———-
Vadim
fresh fruit, croissants, coconut sweets, pizza, tea
“What’s been the most interesting thing that’s happened this evening?”
“I like the conversations. We talked about computational biology.”
———-
Isaac (and Fabián)
brownies, homemade whipped cream, empanadas
“Brownie?”
“Sure!”
———-
Julie (and Neel)
brownies, cupcakes, chocolate-covered pretzels, raisinettes
“This is awesome! You open your door and people come and say hi!”
———-
Ramesh and Szymon
stuffed mushrooms, peppermint brownie balls
“The stuffed mushrooms are gone! There was sundried tomato and herb and bacon, spinach, and feta… and they both turned out really well.”
———-
Hoss
nachos, cookies
“I’m very thankful for MIT residential life for doing some of the living for grad students. (laughs) That’s not grammatically correct!”
———-
Holly (and George)
appetizers from the freezer (bacon-wrapped tater tots and more)
“What is your favorite recipe to make and why?”
“I like new recipes. I’ve made a new recipe every day for the past year.”
———-
Sumit
Various snacks (nachos, chicken wings)
“I wanted to make what people were familiar with, in large quantities!”
———-
Yu-Pu
sweet potato bread, almond hot chocolate
“I got into baking because I have more free time this year.”
———-
Rachael
shortcakes
“I decided to make lemon raspberry and strawberry shortcakes because they seemed like late-spring/early-summer foods, which seemed like a good idea in a blizzard!”
———-
Steve and Frank
brownies, tea
“You’re the last apartment in my article! How do you want to be quoted?”
“We have too much tea.” “Live long and prosper.” “Tea, Earl Gray, hot.”
Challenge time: Feb 14, 8am-noon EST
Challenge: Gather 100+ first kiss stories from people around the world and overlay them on a map. The topic was chosen for its universality, and ease of recall.
Click to view the map and the stories. The map clusters all stories from a certain city. To view them all, expand the list (>>) on the left of the map.
Objectives:
Tools:
Results (at 11:50 am, 10 mins before closing the challenge):
Issues/Conclusions: