Central, Southern and West Texas feel like home to me but prior to living in Cambridge I spent my time in NYC working as a socially engaged artist and teacher of digital media arts.   I have worked as a producer for the public art nonprofit Creative Time and the land advocacy organization 596 Acres. Additionally as a film maker I have worked in partnership with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nonprofit that partners activists with artists to design participatory products to promote civic engagement. As a leader on the Urban Investigation team I worked with youth in the Bronx to make a short film about how the cost of public transportation is decided in NYC.

At the Grand Central Neighborhood Drop-In Shelter for the Homeless I worked for a year as the first Director of Community and Arts Programing and at Harvard I currently work as the Digital Communications Assistant for the Making Caring Common Youth Advisory Board as well as a Senior Digital Editor for the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy. Last fall in collaboration with the African American Student Union at the Harvard Graduate School of Design I designed and implement a civic leadership mapping project with youth from underserved Boston communities.  The project provided tools for youth to map local racial inequity and helped them to horizontally organize with other youth to raise awareness of the issues at stake and seek solutions from local policy makers.

Prior to living in NYC as the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Idea Fund Grant I worked for a year on a film and performance protest series called Migration Patterns During Wartime along the Us/ Mexico Border. The project protested changing immigration policy and practices in Texas and Alabama. Older projects on trauma, parafictions, and identity swapping can be found on my site https://christina-sukhgian-houle.squarespace.com/.

My current research investigates how civic leadership is changing in the digital age and inquires how activist pedagogy can be taught to youth in this shifting media landscape.

Robo-Journalism saw a lot of coverage in the news in the past few years, with a lot of attention being given to a particular type of event in 2014. When a magnitude 4.7 earthquake shook the Los Angeles area, a robo-journalism program wrote and helped to publish the first story about it.

A 1.0 magnitude earthquake occurred 2.49mi S of Lytle Creek, California. Details: https://t.co/DneAcreoLq Map: https://t.co/c12wmekInr

— LA QuakeBot (@earthquakesLA) February 10, 2016

There is nothing terribly remarkable about this, technically speaking. It is essentially a template whose blanks are filled out based on simple bits of information gathered programmatically. Think Mail Merge for extremely simple news stories. To decry the end of journalists based on technology like QuakeBot is alarmist. Firstly, this is more a collaboration with an algorithm than anything else; a collaboration between a programmer, a copy editor, and a human gatekeeper who decides whether or not the article should go out or whether it should be edited/rejected. Even in a more extreme case, one could imagine algorithms feeding a journalist with plain text descriptions of facts that, when concatenated, wouldn’t really amount to a story, but could streamline the task of writing an article, and contextualizing it in a nuanced way.

That said, what evolves from this idea in the future has the potential to impact the field significantly. One of the first steps has already been taken: stories are being compiled and sent “out to the wire without human intervention”. As algorithms and methods become more advanced, the scope of what is reasonable to be reported on by an algorithm will expand. Companies like Narrative Science are already deploying an artificial intelligence based natural language generation product that claims to create “perfectly written narratives to convey meaning for any intended audience”. These systems use technologies such as entity extraction to identify entities of interest such as people, places, and organizations. Add to this the ability to break down the structure of text with part-of-speech parsing and tagging, and you can see how the consumption of large bodies of knowledge could be summarized, identifying the most significant elements and focusing attention on them.

Conversational text generation has produced some humorous results, but has already advanced beyond this stage. These provocations provide opportunities to define what is most valuable in journalism, as well as the perils of technologies that we will interact with in the future. Can an article be mistakenly generated that causes great disaster? Can a negative conversation with a chat bot that mirrors previous undesirable real-world human inputs cause real emotional distress? Can we trust the organizations designing and deploying these technologies? It would be trivial to have an algorithm exclude references to specific people, words, or topics. What are the ethics of blending generated forms of knowledge with human-authored publications?

“Who needs pants anyway?”

A tool I often use to filter and parse my media intake is a third party website called hckrnews.com. The site is actually a tool that categorizes the content from this website: https://news.ycombinator.com/. Y-combinator is a well known incubator based in silicon valley and their blog is relatively influential in the bay area. hckrnews.com makes the site more user friendly by allowing the user to sort content based on user votes, and also allows for sorting content by using the fields of top 10, top 20 and top 50%. Often I find the articles to be interesting in context of the current tech startup climate but they also have many articles of general interest to scientists and thinkers alike. It isn’t fancy, but the idea of having a good news aggregator with a decent curator coupled with a participatory user voting system can in my opinion make for a good web experience.

If you haven’t heard of it, Hearken is something to check out.

It’s a company that’s out to streamline a process in which journalists ask people to submit ideas for questions they should answer in their reporting, allow them to vote on the top answers, and then select a story to pursue, with the public’s help:

Hearken is the evolution of Curious City, a project from Chicago public media station WBEZ that its founder, Jennifer Brandel, has taken from a local success to a national template.

Several public media stations around the country are using Hearken to get people involved in story selection and reporting. Several news organizations have actually asked the people who submit winning story ideas to join reporters out in the field, and learn a ton in the process.

The company’s two main products are its curiosity module and its voting module. Those work on tapping a local community’s curiosity about local goings-on and turning it into a process that helps newsrooms select stories to report that often fall outside the typical definition of news: It may not be particularly timely. It may not be particular newsy. But hey. People around you are curious. And if you follow that curiosity, they’re bound to pay attention, and follow reporters’ efforts to satisfy it.

As Hearken’s site explains:

MUCH IN THE WAY THREADLESS FIGURED OUT HOW TO PRE-SELL T-SHIRTS, AND HOW KICKSTARTER BUILDS COMMUNITY AND DEMAND IN ADVANCE OF A PROJECT, HEARKEN SOURCES INTEREST FOR ARTICLES BEFORE A JOURNALIST EVER PUTS PEN TO PAPER (OR FINGER TO KEYBOARD). READERS CAN TELL JOURNALISTS WHAT THEY WANT TO READ AND VOTE ON THE BEST IDEAS, VALIDATING INTEREST IN THOSE IDEAS BEFORE EFFORT IS PUT INTO REPORTING.

Ultimately, Hearken helps journalists engage the public. It’s difficult to know how best to involve people in the reporting process. But with the right method and the right reward, they can be motivated to share their deepest curiosities about their communities, giving reporters a direction that is hard to beat.

After all: What could be more relevant than answering your readers’ most important questions?

I love maps and was excited to learn recently about CartoDB, which allows you to build your own map in one click after importing data from a spreadsheet. In colored dots or heat maps, this visualization tool can easily show and compare death tolls, virus hotspots, or popular tourism sites…and a million other things. It empowers a writer to tell compelling stories and save a thousand words. I just began to use it. It seems an essential tool for anyone who needs to put data on a map.