1. Aleszu Bajak & Caty Arevalo: Towards Digital Fluency in the Spanish Speaking Newsroom
2. Ali Hashmi & Julia Belluz: Can we use Big Data to improve Health Journalism?
3. Julia Gitis: SchoolsMap
4. Jude Mwenda: Mapsense: Experiments in visualisation on a 3-dimensional space
5. Alex Taylor & Elissar Harati: Behind the Expert Sources: Analyzing the diversity of expert contributions in news coverage
6. William Li & Tammy Drummond: The long shadow of Boston’s gun homicides
7. Mine Gencel Bek: Future of Journalism Education
8. Nina Cabaero & Uri Blau: News Trustee Network
9. Ravi Nessman: Expertpedia
10. Dalia Othman: NetStory
11. Jeff Young: Wearable Diaries Project
12. Hiromi Onishi: Data Workshop for Children: let your kids consume news in smarter way
13. Alexis Hope & Kevin Hu: FOLD
14. Stephen Suen: The Newsgame Design Toolkit
15. Katerina Voutsina: WBUR connecting with the local community

Towards Digital Fluency in the Spanish Speaking Newsroom
Aleszu Bajak & Caty Arevalo

Their tag line is “Breaking down the language barrier between journalists and coders.” Aleszu and Caty felt like they learned a lot this year and came together in their desire to share what they had learned with journalists who work at spanish speaking publications. They have hoped to create hackathons to help newsrooms understand how to present rich multimedia stories, and realized that they would benefit instead from creating a training guide to create multimedia journalism. Their hope is to increase the output of multifaceted products with visualization, podcast and other components, taking advantage of people who have different skillsets in the newsroom during the course of a hackathon or training.

Why in Spanish? Caty explains that there are many improvements to be made in digital fluency in Spanish-speaking newsrooms. Latin America, US, and Spanish news organizations lack anything like the NYT’s Snowfall. If they can connect developers with journalists, they can help close the gap. They also see this as a way to connect younger people with news in a more attractive, interactive way.

Who are they looking to attract to the project? They want to put on the workshop in Latin America and Spain, bringing together developers with data visualization tools in hand. Journalists would come with a story idea and a pre-screened set of data that they had already collected. They see the selection of journalists as key to running these successful workshops, and are recruiting journalists with at least three years of previous experience and a clearly defined project that has a visualization component. To attend, you need to bring a data set in spreadsheet form, as well as a CV and portfolio.

They are doing a test run of their workshop format on Saturday in partnership with Matt Carroll. They will need sponsorship for the real two-day workshop in the proposed locations in Spanish-speaking locales. They have 20+ people signed up for this Sunday.

Mine asks why they limited it to mainstream media. Aleszu says that freelancers are more than welcome. They want the results to be publishable in the end and ideally there would be a place to publish.

Aleszu says the big push for Spanish-speaking media is that we see a lack of these reporting tools in those newsrooms. So why not help the legacy media there?

Ethan says it might be interesting to try one with experienced journalists vs one with a more open admissions policy to see which group had stronger work coming out of the workshop. It would serve as a test of the idea that it was important to screen participants and involve primarily professional journalists.

Catherine notes that the criteria for participation separates the roles of the developers and journalists. But the exchange should also be an experiment in which these two groups see themselves as doing both and contributing to each part equally.

William notes the language of dividing people – what is Aleszu & Caty’s deepened understanding of these categories?

Aleszu says that journalists are inundated with new tools but you realize that you don’t really learn to code or meet coders that you can call up. Part of the goal of the event is to expand your rolodex. Hopefully their event will break down these divides.

Can we use Big Data to improve Health Journalism?
Ali Hashmi & Julia Belluz

They ask, “What are the top three causes of death in America?”
The answer is cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease and heart disease.

But how are they being covered in the media? Chronic lower respiratory disease mentioned only 10 times in the New York Times, while cancer was mentioned 4,400 times over the course of a year. Stories about “news you can use”, like whether red wine makes you healthy or not, appear massively more often than stories about respiratory disease. The health issues that actually affect the population are not always represented correctly in the media. Could they try to rectify that and help health journalists see their blind spots?

The Health Gap (http://sandbox.alihash.com/tool2/) is a tool that takes the top causes of death in America and visualizes the mentions in the NYT and shows that in relation to research funding from NIH, calculating ratios for attention versus mortality and attention versus research funding. Larger circles are more heavily represented in relation to the other two measures.

If I’m a journalist at the New York Times, I could ask how am I doing on covering CLRD, the third biggest killer, yet I’m covering it rarely compared to Parkinson’s, which causes far fewer deaths. Suicide, for example, gets way more media attention than accidents.

They are also looking at how funding goes to these diseases. For instance, over a billion dollars of funding in COPD research, but there is rarely any coverage of it.

Ali says they worked with NIH data that shows how certain factors affect the “life-years” of a person. So they could build a tool that covers disease in terms of a global map. It could also be used by health practitioners®. And if you were an organization, the interactive element they propose for the tool would allow the groups to upload their own data to see how they stack up against other organizations or focused-upon diseases.

Ethan says he is interested in correlating the two ratios that they are calculating – attention v mortality and attention v research. For example, suicide gets very high attention. Attention might actually have a correlation with how much research funding gets allocated to things. If there’s a change in attention does it change anything? For COPD, is the answer that you need more attention in order to change the research funding?

Sam was puzzled by the ratio on the scale of 0-100. Ali says that they pick the maximum out of the set. So Alzheimer’s has the most attention and they get scored at 100.

Mine says to be careful of not appearing to advocate that people experiencing rare illnesses shouldn’t get the same attention.

Julia agrees. She says this is still a crude measure and trying to assess gaps rather than trying to assert that other diseases shouldn’t be covered. Rather it’s a way to highlight existing blind spots.

Ethan asks What’s the plan going forward?

Ali and Julia are going to use WHO data for the tool in the future and to present at the Knight Civic Media Conference this summer. They also want to work doing tests for users to optimize the interface for journalists and the wider proposed audience. In the meantime, the demo they’ve created is live on the web for those who want o explore using the data.

SchoolsMap
Julia Gitis

SchoolsMap is a project Julia has been working on to put all the schools in the world on a map. It has a data side and a communications side. You click on a map and see a video about the school. Within the school you can see more data (like MCAS scores) or more videos in order to interact. She wants to support schools telling stories about themselves in the system.

Welcome to Fenway High School video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7FZ2roM3FU

She shows a demo video from Fenway School in Boston, which involves interviews with teachers and students, speaking about what they value most about the school experience. Julia sees the video as a way in which the school community can represent itself beyond the statistics associated with each school. In the video, students and teachers from the school talk about why it is unique.

Moving forward, Julia is hoping that students will us a tool she’s helping develop called From.us (http://beta.from.us/), which allows people to assemble videos from individually recorded video clips.

SchoolsMap video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewY_eAstmDQ

The video shows Fernando Reimers from Harvard University talking about global education. Then it shows students from different schools asking questions about what the students in other schools do, think about, do for homework, and so on.

She wanted to highlight the videos today to show the storytelling aspect of the project.

Ethan says the project is about making the map, the project is about interviewing local schools and making videos, and then there is a tool that allows people to knit videos together. A school like Fenway will be able to represent their school by putting together their own videos. How does this work in the news space? Is this a journalistic tool?

Julia sees this primarily as a storytelling tool that weaves together information from the outside with the conversations going on among stakeholders within the schools. She wants to build an interactive tool to allow students to discuss their tools and this would serve as an archive.

Katarina wonders who is the audience for this: parents? students?

Julia wanted to show how students would use the tool – to learn about what other schools are like and to interact with other students. So something like a networking tool for students.

Jeff asks about how the data connects with the stories.
Julia gives the example of looking at the MCAS scores around the state and that being the starting point for a student discussion around what that means in the school, which could be archived in videos, i.e. data is the introduction to what the videos are about.

Ethan says that there are a lot of ideas here, but that it’s not entirely clear how they all fit together. It seems like the videos could work well as a way of complementing statistical data about schools and allowing a school to portray itself video video. It’s less clear how the international aspect pitched here works as part of the project.

Mapsense: Experiments in visualisation on a 3-dimensional space
Jude Mwenda

He mentions the phrase “mapporn” in relation to the amount of attention paid to maps. His project inspired by the question: How can we make simulations from Air Crash investigations useful to the visualization of public data sets?

The use cases are for flood mapping, environmental assessment mapping, news simulation as in the Malaysian airline crash.

He shows a slide of Open Street Maps (OSM). The challenge there is that the information is 2D.

Mapsense prototype: http://jmwenda.github.io/mapsense/

He shows a 3D model of MIT that he made. The data is from LIDAR data which gives you digital elevation models, City of Cambridge GIS data, and the base data from OSM. How could this 3D representation help people understand data?

Use cases are meant to make data more comprehensible through seeing it in context. For example, you could put this through Oculus Rift for walkthroughs. The other use case, which he does not elaborate on is urban design politics.

There is also a simple guide/key to understand the metadata associated with the map and how to use the system.

He shows data from the SafeCast project; they collect elevation data but it is very hard to represent that data in 3D space.

Ethan says that Jude has a platform which can use elevation data in a 3D open source way. Google is already trying to do this in various cities, so the new thing you are really adding is about how we add sensor data to this? So we could have the sensor data in three-dimensional space too, but what is the journalistic use case for this?

Jude says the use case is for more immersive storytelling. He sees a way of relating 3D data to physical space and to make stories more immersive and persuasive to audiences. In some cases, newsrooms might use Google Maps 3D to show how a city looks in three dimensions. But this platform could allow a newsroom to create street views for neighborhoods Google hasn’t mapped in 3D, or to add sensor data layers on top of this 3D map.

Ali sees this as a disaster relief reporting tool as well. If you have flooding in Pakistan then you could see what the levels of the water are.

Jude has used this in flood mapping in Mozambique. Using statistical models you can tell who is in danger for floods. You could use this for disaster planning and prevention as well.

Ethan sees two things Jude is putting forward. How do you make immersion part of the news story? To what extent is it a toolkit that lets you do stuff that Google hasn’t built for yet? For Ethan, he is most interested in the sensor data integration. It’s different for air pollution sensing at different elevations. How would you visualize that at different levels? Also they are talking with Joe P’s group about trying to take the in-building sensors outside.

Behind the Expert Sources: Analyzing the diversity of expert contributions in news coverage
Alex Taylor & Elissar Harati

This is a tool for newsrooms to look at their own coverage and for academics as well.

Why do this analysis? They note that there is pressure on news outlets and journalists when reporting on information “black holes” like Syria, North Korea, today, where there is little information coming out of such countries. Experts here have a disproportionate amount of power over how that coverage is framed.

They used UCINET (a network analysis tool) to help visualize the relationship between experts, journalists and news organizations.

They look at a case study in Syria and the role of the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah in the Syrian conflict. The data is from 132 different articles and 14 different news outlets during the summer of 2013 which is when Hezbollah’s involvement was revealed.

They combed through the news articles to identify the experts and add attribute data to each expert, like their nationality and other personal characteristics that might be relevant.

Using centrality measures, they identified the top 5 “experts” that were quoted the most by the articles during this period.

Rami Abdel Rahman, is the topmost identified and quoted expert. He runs the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Coventry, England. He is a dissident and actually a controversial figure, but he is the only source for casualty figures—the only other source stopped counting a year ago. Their graph shows him connected to NYT, AP, BBC, Reuters, AFP and other news organizations.

The Wall Street Journal is revealed to share the most expert sources with other news outlets. The idea here is that there might be an echo chamber of expert sources.

Map: http://zeemaps.com/view?group=966100&x=-2.932899&y=18.711695&z=15

Elissar’s map shows that experts located in the US and outside Syria had a lot of influence whereas there were no experts in Syria.

Potential applications of this tool include academic scholar of research agendas, but also news organizations that could look at the gaps and biases in their coverage.

Ethan says this is the hard work of identifying stories and coming up with a really interesting data set. The most cited expert being a controversial figure is very interesting. Everyone feels like they have to give a casualty figure and it’s interesting to see where that is coming from. He asks how someone would realistically use this in a newsroom. Do you think this would lead people to use other experts? Do news organization differentiate themselves based on which experts they use?

Alex says that a reporter who is under deadline has time as a constraint in reaching out to experts. This kind of tool might help them understand the limitations of that. Elissar says you need a lot of willingness on the part of the media to look at themselves.

Ethan says it’s possible that this is the kind of thing that’s automatable. The question of using it for self-scrutiny is really interesting.

Dalia says that this is an issue with newsrooms when they don’t have a lot of sources. Also sometimes the sources are not reliable. Have Alex and Elissar thought of generating a list of other possible sources?

Alex says that that is what Nini and Ravi’s project is related to in finding new or better experts. It wasn’t something they were considering in their project, but it calls for that as a possible next step.

Matt Carroll says that news organizations might be open to this, but news critics would love something like this.

Ethan thinks this is an incredible proof of concept and data set. The place to go next is how do you build this in an automated way. The second is building the recommendation system. How do we bring in other voices? Does this become interactive?

The long shadow of Boston’s gun homicides
William Li & Tammy Drummond

They are looking at the historical concentration of gun violence in certain neighborhoods of Boston. They differentiate themselves from Homicide Watch by focusing on the victims left behind by gun deaths. They were able to trace back 7 years worth of gun killings in a particular area, and map them to understand the trends in concentration. They can also layer other kinds of data on top of the map. Tammy notes the high concentration of churches that there are in relation to gun deaths.

Website: http://www.theonesleftbehind.org/

William introduces the site. You can filter by year, but it is often the same neighborhoods from year to year that are affected. They used these transparent gun icons to mark the gun deaths. Each gun icon can be clicked to reveal information about the person who was killed. When you click on the gun then it shows the streetview image of their neighborhood, a kind of virtual tour of what’s going on there.

Tammy argues that a lot of the richness of their project is creating a space where you can listen to the victims. They play an interview with Ruth Rollins who describes how she explained her son’s murder to his two-year-old daughter

Ruth Rollins audio: https://soundcloud.com/tammerlin/ruth-rollins-on-sons-murder

They also play a video piece interviewing Kim Odom reflecting on her son’s death: shot and killed on October 4, 2007 while playing basketball outside.

Their goal, through the map and these multimedia stories, is to give voice to the survivors that are often invisible while around us.

Ethan says they have done something very interesting with regard to something that could be replicated. One of the challenges of the maps is that with the big patterns we don’t get the specifics. The zoom in to Google Street View you get a sense of what that neighborhood looks like. One of the things to think about is how much reportorial work we can do on this. We would have portraits with every family member – this could be a life’s work. Through the combination of interviews and neighborhood pictures you can drill down specifically into the issue. How do you combine the data story with the personal storytelling? Are you bringing this to Oakland? How would you bring this to your newsroom?

Tammy says you can take this in two different directions. YOu could develop an audio archive that invites members of the community to share their stories. It would be like StoryCorps. That’s one idea. The map that William has created – there are so many possibilities that you could do with that. Basically what’s required is time and money. This would be applicable in any city that has a gun problem.

Ali suggests 68 Blocks (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/specials/68blocks), the series from the Boston Globe.

Ethan notes that gun killing patterns differ across cities. The breakthrough here is laying out the maps with the stories to the side, which work as a framework where people can plug in more stories down the line. You could open source this project and encourage other journalists to do this in their own cities.

Uri notes that this really should be in the hands of a nonprofit that makes this their full-time job to keep on top of the stories.

Matt Carroll says that Homicide Watch allows people to update the information about people themselves. The problem is that news organizations don’t keep paying attention these stories. Allowing people to upload their own videos and audio might be a way to give the project broader reach.

Future of Journalism Education
Mine Gencel Bek

She conducted 21 Interviews face to face and over email, with journalism instructors and educators, with a focus on working journalists or former journalists.

We are seeing more jobs in Digital Media, New Media, and visiting fellows in these fields. Institutions are trying to adjust. She shows a slide of the top journalism schools including McGill, Ball State, Emerson College, and Northeastern. Top journalism schools were distinguished by integrating multimedia teaching into their syllabus, hands-on experiences, co-ops in newsrooms, etc.

She was surprised to discover a dichotomy between journalism and technology in her conversations, a tension that underlay many of the interviews. Many journalists want to return to “core values” of journalism rather than incorporating more technology.

Some interviewees did argue that both technology and reporting skills should be covered in the journalism programs.

Another area of issue was which degree journalists should obtain: a journalism degree? a different subject area that gives them depth they can bring to their journalistic work? or journalism AND a second degree for depth and breadth.

Ethan says that one of the key insights from this research seems to be that a lot of journalists see technology as a core tension but at the same time it’s interesting to find that studying journalism isn’t as helpful as studying another field. Is there a way to resolve those two things? Is that a tension for you too?

Mine notes that there is no central guide to follow through these tensions.

William asks if the push for more specialized expertise related to the idea that the world is more complicated? Like you need to more about a particular domain in order to relate it to the public?

Mine says yes and that some readers are also experts.

Ali asks if nowadays journalists have to wear more hats. In the past there was an IT dept separate from the journalists.

Mine says that as a social scientist the critical perspective is always important, which the journalists also emphasize. But journalists also stress data journalism, math and statistics, and other areas. Matt Carroll had to teach himself these skills. From the labor perspective, this means a lot of demands on the journalists.

News Trustee Network
Nini Cabaero & Uri Blau

They open with a problem – a news story could break anywhere in the world at any time. If you are a news organization your people are far away and it will cost a lot of money to get them to the place. Newrooms lack the resources to cover around the world.

The problem they are trying to solve is that news outlets need someone on the ground. Someone they can trust, not just some random person from social media.

They outline the concept of a “News Trustee” – this could be a journalist, a fixer, or another person accredited by News Trustee Network, the business they want to start. They would

They are exploring the business models that could support NTN, including membership fees charged to media organizations and news trustees and percentage royalties on stories they contribute to.

NTN prototype website: http://ntn.sunstar.com.ph/

Nini shows the website for the NTN. It opens to a world map and a directory of the news trustees that have registered. There is a chat function.

They had another Nieman Fellow attempt to register, which went successfully.

They want to eventually have country-specific pages.

The chat function will allow news trustees to chat with each other.

Ethan congratulates them on taking it to early prototype stage. He asks how we ask people to sign up well before we have a moment of emergency? For instance, if the bomb goes off in Ulaan Baatar, everyone will want a contact in Mongolia, but that only works if we have tha tperson in the system already.

Uri responds that they hope to partner with a news organization like Global Voices that could seed the network with people around the world.

Ethan asks if they couldn’t use LinkedIn and searching for reputable news organizations in specific locations where they want to fill out the network.

Uri notes that the worldwide network is necessary for it to be business viable. But

Jeff asks about how organizations might be pay membership fees. Are they signing up to pay a fee because they hope to get money later?

Uri says you could either be the mediator and take a cut, or simply connect them allow for the negotiation of any pay. In the latter case you would need a fee from both sides upfront. Nini feels like that the membership fee is important because it establishes a contract upfront that people have bought into.

David Haddad mentions Storyful, which grew thanks to its ability to connect people around the world. He thinks they make money through subscription fees now after the demonstrated value.

Nini says that tapping into an existing network like LinkedIn or Storyful might be a good practice.

Alex asks about the vetting process for joining the site.

Uri says that they potential members would need material used by a reporter in breaking news coverage, and that process would be evolving.

Expertpedia
Ravi Nessman

The problem Ravi is trying to solve is the time and knowledge problem. Newsroom has shrunk by a third since 1992, and reporters are asked to produce more stories in less time than before. The Oregonian journalists are required to post three times a day.

They are assigned stories in areas they don’t know anything about. They produce poor quality stories as a result, and might overuse the same set of experts again and again.

Meet Expertpedia. Ravi’s proposed system provides a list of proven, respected experts on news topics, with access to their academic research, op-eds and media mentions, and their contact information, as well as reviews of how well these experts perform on television or how useful they are in interviews.

You could rank the experts by citations, grabbed from Google Scholar. Author of the first article in Google Scholar becomes the first listing in Expertpedia. Google News search is then used to grab any mentions of that expert in the news. University websites would additionally be combed to grab contact info for the author. Ravi wants to figure out some way to reduce the amount of overexposure of any given expert in the system.

The goal is an uncurated resource, that functions essentially as a lightweight search engine. Although, ratings by journalists on experts can add to the relevancy engine.

Problems that Ravi admits include timeliness: research is often connected to older phenomena and contexts. Op-ed searches will be biased toward the most recent headlines rather than the most relevant. And relying online searches means that you could get random artifacts from their search process.

Ethan says that Ra vi has done a good job of defining a classic problem of journalists. However, he notes that relying on citation rank biases toward older academics rather than the most expert on a given subject—Mark Granovetter might not be best suited to speaking about Twitter. University Relations offices might be really excited about this tool though.

Matt Carroll says this reminds him of the old ProfNet, which was a great source. Matt likes the rating idea—that’s the real value here if you can get journalists to go back and review the experts they connect to.

Ethan notes that ProfNet works for PR professionals—it’s built for speed. It’s probably not great for journalists where the need is expertise. For those of us who care about diversity in the news space, then that’s another dimension. These algorithms all have politics, which need to be recognized. It’s important think further about how automatable this solution is.

NetStory
Dalia Othman

Most journalists look for the story and try to tell it. Many questions arise out of the issue of how this works with the rise of citizen journalism.

The Berkman Center’s NetStory working group, which Dalia runs with Heather Craig, organized a workshop earlier this year looking at the Bangladeshi riots. The noticed there is a knowledge gap between wanting to tell a story and being able to do so.

NetStory is is targeting communities, activists, journalism students, and aspiring filmmakers.

Dalia shows a prototype of the website.

They developed a “networked story” card game. That takes workshop participants through the logic of identifying and creating a story through different media.

She shows an example created by Jeff Young from a workshop: http://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/anon/mfav7a-vladimir-putin#2

Ethan says there has been an enormous explosion in Digital Storytelling tools in the past five years particularly with HTML5. He wonders how well having centralized reviews will work. If you build catalog, tools, use cases and then make the reviews more participatory maybe that will work better. How do you sustain and keep it up over time?

Dalia says that part of solving the problem of building a community is running the workshops to bring people into the project.

Katerina sees it as a great way to introduce the tools to journalism students. But not all the tools are great for newsroom use? How do you filter and advise the students in the educational case?

Dalia concedes this is the first phase of the project. The second phase, which requires developer help, will involve tags and the ability to search for certain dimensions like functionality and how tools connect to others in the project.

Ethan is interested to see if this could work for newsrooms as well. The game takes on the question of decision-making around tools really nicely.

Wearable Diaries Project
Jeff Young

Jeff starts from the questions: Could Glass help people tell their stories? Other journalists he spoke with that had used Google Glass said that everything could simply be done with a smartphone, but the new thing was the point-of-view camera.

Jeff has three ideas for Wearable Diaries. The first idea involves occasional on-screen question prompts that the the subject answers on video. The second idea is to automatically record 10 seconds of video every 5 minutes—for what Jeff calls the “B-roll” to collect clips from everyday life. The third idea would involve coaching wearers to record their day by manually recording key moments

The first test was with Primavera and she did a project that went on for multiple days. She was showing a collaboration between artists and scientists at a biohack lab. She periodically recorded footage and then later did a voiceover.

People did not like the idea of randomly recording. The pushback was real. They decided that was a bad idea. They want to experiment with using Google Calendar in the future for this.

Leslie’s Wearable Diary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7E94o-RecQ

Leslie, another student in the class, did a project with it on her last day in Cambridge. This detailed her trip to the grocery store to prepare for a party. Leslie did not enjoy wearing Google Glass. She disliked the experience from a social standpoint and it distracted her from her day with her friends. Others refused to do the project in the first place.

Jeff says maybe he hasn’t found the right story yet, or that Google Glass may just be more difficult than it’s worth because of technical ease of use and with respect to contemporary culture and social norms.

Website: http://wearablediaries.org/

Ethan thinks Leslie’s video is an interesting way of experiencing someone’s day. It’s more personal than journalistic. What’s a story you would imagine telling with this?

Jeff admits the form becomes more single viewpoint and promotional, which deviates from the goal of most journalism. But you can imagine different features where it might be the right story for this medium. Additionally, they might not work well as standalone but as part of a package of different viewpoints on the topic.

Catherine mentions a project that gave disposable cameras to migrants crossing the border, i.e. groups where it might be difficult to record a groups story. Also there is an opportunity here to counter-surveil and feel the emotion of a person undergoing surveillance like at a border checkpoint.

Jeff so that requires a producer to put together the research necessary to track down those stories and then put the Glass in their hands, but that’s an expensive proposition. Perhaps they could create some kind of pocket protector holder for a smartphone in the pocket instead.

Data Workshop for Children: let your kids consume news in smarter way
Hiromi Onishi

This is for making kids better consumers of the news. At the end of June kids will go to Summer vacation in the United States. But Hiromi remembers her summer vacations in Japan were always filled with many homework assignments. At the beginning of summer vacation the students work hard then there’s a big dip and then at the end of summer vacation you get back on the wagon. She did assignments like measure the temperature every day and collect measurements of flowers everyday.

The newspaper helped the students at the end of the summer by providing infographics abotu the summer topics of inquiry.

She shows charts from fivethirtyeight.com

Hiromi recently hosted a conference about innovation in the newsroom with Amanda Cox, Joi Ito and several others. The issue wasn’t data visualization. Joi said that Amanda is a unicorn – she is unique in her interests and abilities in both statistics and journalism.

The question from parents is How do we teach our kids how to handle the data?

Asahi Shimbun has already been using newspapers in the classroom to talk about important issues.

They have two ideas of how to put this into practice. First, they could collaborate with the grade schools we have already worked with through the Newspaper in Education (NIE) program in Japan. Second option is for them to organize an open workshop.

Hiromi hasn’t done a workshop yet with the kids but she did research what Asahi Shimbun has done in the classrooms. They have done work about the recent natural disasters like the earthquake and hurricane and the perspective of the kids on these things.

Ethan is excited to see that data collection and analysis is already something that is part of Japanese summer educational experiences. Connecting that existing practice to then employing that data in a real context. Like some of the other projects based on the workshops, we’ll know more about it after you’ve carried out the first workshop. Maybe the thing to do is build a workshop around a data set that schools are already collecting.

Hiromi is thinking of talking with teachers in education department who would be willing to do things as a trial. They did a data hack in February with their own journalists but they have never done it with kids. They might try to do that with kids soon.

Ethan is curious about what others in newsrooms think about doing data work with kids. Anybody else working on something like this?

FOLD
Alexis Hope & Kevin Hu

Their question is how you explain messy, complex news stories that need a lot of context. They previously used the Malaysian plane crash story and how the NYT put an infographic about radar next to unrelated text.

FOLD is a context-creation platform.Their idea is to add structure to provide context, adding elements horizontally and vertically. FOLD enables “curated tangents” out from the primary text of the story.

Since then they have been working on an authoring platform. Then they are integrating web services to help authors. They show the example of an explainer about the Crimean Crisis. You can attach maps, images, text, gifs to different text modules of the story.

They did not yet have time to do user testing. They would like to see if adding context in this way is useful. They want to maximise usability. Feature-wise, they want to add tagging, the reusability of different blocks that other FOLDers have created, and embeddability of the stories on other pages.

Ethan says its really impressive that you created prototype and told the Crimea story with it. What’s interesting when you move into early product phase, are they going to want the features you want? You could push this in all directions. It started as a serious take but then what if you make it an annotation system where people annotate stories with gifs? Ethan believes that the core insight is right that stories can be told through new visual languages.

He hopes they will put it out there so we can see where people go with it and that Kevin and Alexis will find people who will engage with it in a deep way.

Caty loves the tool and would like to use it right away.

David would like the system to know what parts of the story he has read so he wouldn’t have to read them again. Greys out the elements you’ve already seen maybe.

From a newsroom’s perspective they would be able to reuse content modules.

William is curious about what the path forward might be: embedding the FOLDs in news sites or creating its own site like Medium?

Kevin says that building something like Medium is really hard, they enjoyed a good bit of social capital with the Twitter connection. But content is king, so going to the news organizations makes more sense.

The Newsgame Design Toolkit
Stephen Suen

Just last week there was a Newsgames Hackathon in Germany, suggesting the timeliness for his project. He refers to the book NewsGames (http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/newsgames) that provides some of the inspiration to this space and suggests a typology of news games: current event games, infographic games, documentary games, puzzle games, literacy games, and community games.

Key features of news games require fun, replayability, and context (Sisi Wei, NICAR 2013). In his project, he is focusing on the context aspect.

In his project he’s working from a definition of a game something like this: conflict + rules = quantifiable outcome. Following the critiques of serious games, Stephen reminds us games are not a way to “trick” people into consuming content, learning, engaging with serious issues, etc.

He is creating a website (http://newsgam.es) as resource inspired by The Guardian’s Data Journalism handbook. It’s built on the following principles:

– Practical, abstracted methodology to design newsgames.
– Open source contributions – use it as a way of connecting journalists and gamers
– Directory of Case studies

Ethan advocates trying to get folks who are working in newsrooms to come and hack on a news game. This project connects with Dalia’s work and some of the other projects that are designing workshops.

Stephen mentions a project that came out of a recent hackathon (http://newsgameshack.thegoodevil.com/) which is a tool help people think about what could be created.

Alex asks whether Stephen has thought about certain types of stories?

Stephen says yes – systems (where you are trying to describe how a system works, like an economic or governmental system), empathy (social injustice stories), data (any story that has a component of data).

WBUR connecting with the local community
Katerina Voutsina

Katerina outlines a problem currently facing WBUR: how do we enhance our subscribership.

WBUR was founded in 1950 and is known for many high-profile shows like On Point, Car Talk and more. They have two streams for attracting users – online and radio. Online their top three offerings are Common Health, ARTery, and Op-Eds. She also shows their most popular social media discussions.

WBUR’s business model is based on viewing news as a public good, no charge for content via radio or online. They received money through sponsorship, federal subsidies, foundation and listener support.

She is trying to create a diagnostic tool for them (and will be working with them over the summer).

She created a map of WBUR’s subscriber data by location in the United States since 2002, using latitude and longitude. They also looked into the changing demographics among subscribers during the the past ~10 years. Most subscribers were between 45 and 54 years old in 2003, which has shifted to 35 to 44 years old by 2013. Several local towns were the ones with the highest density of subscribers.

When WBUR asks for money they ask for donations, not for money for specific stories. The fundraising technique is about connecting with news and with the station. She looked for missed opportunities. One of those might be incentive for the reader to go online and invest or donate money to the station. Is there a way to use mobile devices and geotag them? Finally, how do we connect subscribers with reporters?

The tool she is developing with WBUR relies on testing with the highest trafficked parts of the site, offering discounts or additional content to subscribers who read that content online.

Her last slide questions the “local approach” since many subscribers are not in the Boston area. Many are in Florida, some in California. Are there partnerships between reporters and communities? Many listeners are more interested in federal news and health issues.

Ethan thinks the next step might be to do some qualitative work to enrich the quantitative work. The Florida listeners might just be snowbirds that leave Boston during Winter months, but he’s less sure of the California listeners. So they should be asking these different groups what would give them a better experience.

Katerina is proposing is an optional download button rather than a Like/Dislike button. The download button will offer the readers so additional content and then the interaction actually records the subscriber’s location and other demographic information, which could be used to grab that qualitative side of the picture.

Live demo of Attention Plotter using Trayvon Martin Data and TF-IDF: http://erhardtgraeff.com/demo/aplotter/trayvon-tfidf.html

This work comes out a research project pursued by Matt Stempeck, Ethan Zuckerman, and myself, studying the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin story from last spring. We collated a diverse set of media sources involved in the media ecosystem around Trayvon Martin: blog and mainstream media articles (via Media Cloud), Newspaper front page percentages (via PageOneX), Broadcast TV mentions (via Archive.org), Google Searches for ‘Trayvon Martin’ and ‘George Zimmerman’ (via Google Trends), Tweets, and Change.org petition signatures. We normalized the amount of content produced by each media source per day against their own peaks over the time period. This gives us a relative measure of attention paid to the story over time.

Trayvon Martin Attention Histogram (original, static graph)

Our original, static attention histogram is great for telling the story of the ebbs and flows of attention across the whole ecosystem. However, it’s not ideal for comparing two or three media sources’ attention volumes directly. The graph also falls short as a tool for exploring the data more deeply. To be specific, our original process for analyzing the framings of the Trayvon Martin story was to find the most highly cited (linked to) articles in the Media Cloud corpus and read them, looking for keywords. One strong example was ‘Marijuana’ and ‘Drug Dealer.’ These were extracted from a key Daily Mail article citing The Daily Caller and Wagist blog, who went through Trayvon Martin’s social media profiles and dug up relevant details. This framing of Trayvon Martin as less than innocent was a strategy by the Right to battle against the gun control and racial profiling campaigns coming from the Left. Ideally though, we should be able to identify those keywords like ‘marijuana’ without reading a bunch of articles.

Enter Attention Plotter. The tool allows us to load in a dataset of normalized media volumes as well as a set of most common words in a media source per day. The interactivity supports viewing the original clustered bar graph or sparklines, which are interpolated line graphs charting the rises and falls of those normalized volumes. By clicking the media source color squares in the legend, you can toggle their bars or lines on and off to compare to sources directly. For instance, leaving just the Google Searches up you can see how ‘George Zimmerman’ searches overtake ‘Trayvon Martin’ searches in April around the time of Zimmerman’s arrest.

'Trayvon Martin' / 'George Zimmerman' Google Search Comparison

By rolling over the dates in the x-axis, you can view popover word clouds scaled to the magnitude of the each word’s significance. TF-IDF is used to calculate their magnitudes in order to adjust for the expected commonality of words like ‘trayvon’, ‘martin’, or ‘zimmerman’. Here then we see on March 26th, that the fourth most common word is ‘marijuana’. This aligns with the publication of that Daily Mail article.

March 26th Word Cloud

Is this a Tool for Journalists?
The goal for this project was and is to serve as an academic research tool allowing us and others to explore media controversies like Trayvon Martin. I can imagine two applications of this work for journalists though. One would be for media columnists interested in writing about how a story unfolded over multiple media spaces, giving them a window into an ecosystem view of the situation as well as some quantitative data to base their insights on. A second option might be integrating Attention Plotter into the news room as an analytical tool for tracking and assessing a news organizations performance against other media sources to aid in identifying gaps in coverage around such controversies.

Future Development
A few features will be added over the summer. I want to allow day-by-day timeline text to be imported so that key events can be included right on the visualization for reference. I also want to incorporate the tasks of normalizing the media sources data and the TF-IDF analysis natively in the JavaScript library so that less pre-processing is required for the data, as well as offering the ability to show data peaks in their raw numbers. Finally, we at the Center for Civic Media are planning to incorporate the visualization directly into the Media Cloud platform for other researchers to use as a native exploration tool on top of the corpus.

97-55, transportation bill passes

— Charlie Ticotsky (@CharlieTicotsky) April 9, 2013

We learn from WBUR the amount allocated for the bill and that the legislation may be vetoed by the Governor.

In late-night vote, Mass. House passes $500M transportation finance bill — shy of veto override margin: wbur.fm/ZusEMP

— WBUR (@WBUR) April 9, 2013

A coalition of Bay State organizations pushing for substantial transportation infrastructure investment, called Transportation 4 Mass, has been organizing around the legislation on the #mapoli and #fixingtranspo hashtags.

It’s 11:45 pm. Do you know how YOUR Rep voted? #mapoli #fixingtranspo (or were you watching the game..?)

— Transportation 4 MA (@T4MASS) April 9, 2013

They were joined by progressive activist organization People For the American Way and the Mayor of Somerville.

Invest in a better Massachusetts | MetroWest Daily News ow.ly/jQHTT #mapoli #fixingtranspo @t4mass

— RightWingWatch MA (@RWwatchMA) April 8, 2013

After all the amendments are discussed, the reality is the Leg transpo plan is still inadequate. Do better for MA. #mapoli #NoJWM

— Joseph A. Curtatone (@JoeCurtatone) April 8, 2013

Before the vote, Governor Patrick asked State representatives to not legislate a “short term fix,” which received push back from Twitter users upset about the possibility of new taxes to cover the cost.” Today, the Governor started to work on finding middle ground with lawmakers and appeared hopeful that a compromise could be found.

Last Night’s Vote is Only the 1st step in leg process. I Remain Committed to Finding Common Ground on a Plan to Create Growth + Opportunity.

— Deval Patrick (@MassGovernor) April 9, 2013

I am Hopeful. Both the Speaker and Senate President have agreed these are investments worth making. twitter.com/MassGovernor/s…

— Deval Patrick (@MassGovernor) April 9, 2013

Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo was not available for comment on Twitter; he has no account. But here is a picture of him with a horse.

Happy #mapoli birthday to Speaker Robert DeLeo, pictured here with a horse: mapoliwithanimals.tumblr.com/post/254277124…

— David S. Bernstein (@dbernstein) March 27, 2013

It remains to be seen what the final transportation legislation will look like. But we can safely say that, progressives and transportation investment advocates, like Michigan fans, were hoping for a different outcome Monday night…

best GIF of the night: “Sad #Michigan Cheerleader Is Sad” cdn3.sbnation.com/uploads/chorus… #NCAAChamp

— Ratty (@HeyRatty) April 9, 2013

Interactive Network Graph of Occupy Boston's Mailing Lists linked by their Shared Users

The Story
Can we learn something about a social movement by looking at the digital tools it uses to organize? The Occupy Movement was defined as much by its highly visible occupation tactic as by its use of new digital media to organize and mobilize. The success of the movement was really to inject new language into our society about inequality. Think the 1% and the 99%. This was achieved through a sustained campaign of media activism. Language was developed to describe the inequalities between the common man and the rich, embodied by Wall Street — the perpetrators of the recent global financial crisis, and various forms of media were created to get the message out. The occupations then served to keep that message in mainstream media as they attracted sustained coverage themselves for both good and bad reasons.

We see this play out in the network of mailing lists. Occupy Boston’s general Media list had the most messages posted it in during the period September 2011 – October 2012, consistent with what we would expect from a movement focused on media activism. In terms of expansiveness of user participation, the Ideas mailing list takes the crown, which is where much of the early intellectual labor on defining Occupy Boston’s mission and direction was hashed out. In the data, we also see a lot of overlap amongst the mailing lists. All but one list (OB Updates, which was a unidirectional announcement list), shares many active users with other lists. The median degree is near 20, which is almost a perfect mesh network. This suggests that this public mailing lists, although sometimes dedicated to very specific themes or “committees,” enjoyed a lot of interconnection. Between the major mailing lists (seen as an outer ring on the network), which are more general interest, we see 100+ shared users on their mutual edges. This number drops off for some of the more niche mailing lists and could represent a few key organizers or overzealous mailing list participants. A more qualitative study is needed to tell the rest of this story.

Quick Statistics

• Mailing Lists: 22
• Total Messages: 36,303
• Total Users: 922 (unique email addresses)

Distribution of Total Users and Messages across Mailing Lists (left y-axis is Messages scale; right y-axis is Users scale

How I Made the Network Graph
I downloaded the mailman archives from September 2011 to October 2012 from Occupy Boston’s public mailing lists, i.e. those that do not require moderator access to join. I wrote a Python script to parse the archives, which are in a standard mbox format, into an SQLite database. I devised a schema with a standard set of ids for mailing lists and individual users, and used these ids to extract a network of users shared among different mailing lists with a simple SQL query, storing resultant nodes (mailing lists) and edges (shared user relationships) in CSV files.

I imported the nodes and edges files into Gephi after hand editing their column names to conform to Gephi’s standard. Gephi automatically aggregated the edges between nodes to create weighted edges representing the total number of shared users. I adjusted the layout in Gephi to represent the weighted edges using different thicknesses. The nodes were scaled by total users active in each mailing list, an attribute extracted from my database, and their color was scaled on a pale to dark red spectrum according to the total number of messages during the period of analysis, also extracted from the database. I used the Forced Atlas 2 layout algorithm, which forces the most central nodes out of the center for easier comprehension, and then hit the graph a few times with the Expansion layout algorithm to give extra space between nodes.

Using the Sigmajs Exporter plugin, I exported the network so that it could be viewed on the web as an interactive visualization. I customized the default javascript and css in several ways to display the network graph more clearly. In the config.json file, I manipulated the graph properties to create greater contrasts between node sizes and edge weights, and adjusted the label threshold under drawing properties to ensure all nodes were labeled. I modified the sigma.js defaults for edge color, by forcing them to be a standard grey rather than the color of their source. This corrects for what is actually an undirected network (shared user relationships are mutual) being interpreted as directed. Finally, in the “Information Pane” I forced it to display the edge weights (shared number of users) between the active node and its neighbors, next to their listed names.

A colleague of mine remarked as we walked by, “That’s a bit misleading. It’s not an ‘open cloud,’ it’s just an ‘open stack’ they are running.” Well well! Do we smell bullshit here?

My suspicion was buzzwords, the classic “glittering generalities.” Rather than accurately describing the platform they were just realizing that “open stack” would never get the traction needed to sell the service and so wanted to bump their numbers with a reference to “cloud computing.” Note the Google Trends graph below:

It turns out OpenStack is actually a specific open source software project. And the more I read from the Rackspace website, the Wikipedia article on OpenStack, coverage in InformationWeek, and elsewhere, I actually found myself pretty well convinced that “open cloud” was an appropriate descriptor of what they were trying to do: create an open source cloud computing infrastructure that was portable across different hardware and ran like a true OSS project, backed by a non-profit foundation and a diverse pool of contributors, and licensed under the Apache license.

Their constant reference to inventing OpenStack with NASA checked out too. It really was based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud computing project plus Rackspace’s own CloudFiles code. Nebula has since spun out into its own venture-backed company to continue commercializing the service, but that didn’t raise any red flags for me.

Of course, this is all a savvy business decision on Rackspace’s part to offer an alternative to proprietary models like Amazon’s EC2 and VMware’s virtualization tools which were just getting out when they started this project. Their commitment to open source software projects may be only because it gives them a distinct brand of cloud storage with geek and OSS zealot appeal. And their pitch of course invokes fear and testimonials about how important it is to be on a platform that is flexible and non-proprietary. No one would want to screw up their web services by chaining themselves to Amazon, right?

In the end, it seems I found myself fact checking both Rackspace’s and my colleague’s claims. Perhaps I should get a comment from an Amazon representative to see what the counter-spin tells me…

Her childhood summers were spent in the family’s cottage on Block Island Sound in Charlestown, Rhode Island [2]. Her family participated in the Fresh Air Fund program that arranges free summer vacations for disadvantaged youth from New York City [2]. Louis Ramirez, three years younger than Julia, used to come up from the Bronx for three weeks every summer to swim, play sports, and just hang out with the family [2].

Her academic life has centered around Tufts University [6*], her parents’ alma mater [7*] (Her father sits on the Board of Advisors for the School of Arts and Sciences [8]). She attended undergrad there from 2005–2009, studying International Relations and Spanish [6*]. She is currently a student there at the Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy, and is on track to graduate this May with her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy, concentrating in Human Security and International Communication [6*].

She’s been an activist and advocate for certain causes, including participating in a protest against China’s support for the Sudanese government in 2007 in NYC called Chain 2 China in 2007 [9], linking the Asian power to the Darfur Genocide [10].

Academically and professionally she’s been interested in the issue of Forced Migration [11]. Between undergrad and grad school she lived and worked in South Africa as the Regional Director of Ubuntu Africa Child Healthcare [6*], and then in Lebanon as the Assistant to the Education Project Manager in the Beirut field office of UNRWA [6*][12]. Last summer she interned for Mercy Corps in Northern Iraq [6*], and wrote a piece for BBC World on Cafe 11, a space offering a slice of freedom for the youth growing up in that conservative part of Kurdistan [13].

Online, she occasionally goes by “seahorseunicorn.” You can peek into her travels on Flickr [14] and her music tastes on Last.fm under that handle [15].

* You may need to look at the Google Search cache of the LinkedIn pages to see relevant content: [3][6][7]

Julia’s Reaction to Her Internet Summary
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Our Interview: Herself and Her Own Work
In reflecting on what drives her, Julia says she was initially interested in humanitarian work like crisis response, but the more she learned about the causes of the conflicts she was looking at the more it led her toward an interest in the underlying problems. “I’ve ended up focusing on governance-building as what I think is the best answer to addressing a lot of the issues that are arising right now. When I was in Iraq last summer I was working on civil society development, kind of the base level of governance-building, and what really stuck out to me is the importance of access to information, free expression, and civil and political rights, and how that influences civic participations and citizen interaction with the government.”

When Julia was a kid, she traveled a lot. Her mom worked on emerging markets in Russia and Eastern Europe. And when she was in high school, she participated in summer service trips to Central America. “[They] probably served the kids participating [like her] more than the communities they worked in.” But they also made her more curious about other parts of the world, and she said, “experiencing inequality and feeling that there’s something innately wrong with that and not knowing what that was or being able to do anything about it. Since high school, I had a drive to work vaguely in that area and didn’t really know what that meant.”

She admits her parents played a big role in her life and in going to Tufts, but contends she “applied there because it had a good IR program,” and “coming here [Tufts] exposed me to more specific avenues through which I could pursue this work.”

In college, she took a semester off and interned with UNHCR in Geneva, and spent some time in Zambia working in a refugee settlement. “That was my exposure to more of the humanitarian field.”

After graduation, she went to South Africa for about year, “basically managing a care center for HIV positive youth in the townships outside of Cape Town…. I did everything from dealing with the basic communications… they didn’t have internet or telephone or anything when I got there…. to liaising with bigger organizations working in the area like Doctors Without Borders and the health department of the South African government to coordinate programs for the children.”

I asked her how her experience there changed her. “It was kind of disheartening because it [South Africa] is revered as this model of successful reconciliation, and if you go to South Africa, it’s still one of the most racist places you could probably go and in a lot of ways I think it’s getting worse…. I think it’s just one of the things that happens when you’re working in development or humanitarian fields, where the more work you do the more disillusioned you get…. In South Africa, there’s this thing called the AIDS Orphan Generation, because the president after Nelson Mandela wouldn’t allow ARVs into the country for a long time because he denied the connection between HIV and AIDS and thought that ARVs was a Western conspiracy to kill Africans…. So then all these people that had HIV died off and had children right before they died. Then these drugs were allowed into the country, so there are all these little kids that are surviving with AIDS while their parents are dead. Hearing about these kids and seeing how resilient they are—as cheesy as it sounds—that’s I think what continues to drive anyone whose in this work and sees the higher level issues with corruption and nepotism and everything. And despite the fact these kids are getting completely shafted, they still wanted to be doctors and lawyers and love life. I think it was a good introductory experience into the field.”

She left Cape Town for Beirut, when her best friend moved to Lebanon to work for The Daily Star. “I traveled around the region for a few months, didn’t really know anything about it. I was really intrigued; I never really thought I would be a Middle East person or interested in going there. But I kind of fell in love with it.”

“I still had a house and a ticket back to South Africa and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. It wasn’t on my radar at all to stay there when I started traveling. The thing that really assured me that I would be okay there, was the fact that the culture is so inclusive and neighborly in a way that I had never experienced. I think that was the main thing the really drew me to the Middle East; I just felt much more secure than were I to stay in Europe or anywhere else without any type of employment…. There are quite a few Tufts alums or people I knew through other networks that are based in Beirut. So I felt a certain degree of security or like a safety net, even though I had absolutely no plans. And in my life I’ll probably never again have no obligations to anyone but myself, and where I didn’t have a lot of money but I wasn’t in debt, so I could just do something like this. It was super exciting; I have no regrets about doing it, and I learned a lot.”

She eventually got a job with UNRWA, the UN organization that works with Palestinians, working on an EU funded project to overhaul the Lebanese education system for Palestinians. “Since the Palestinians are refugees there they don’t have access to any of the services that Lebanese nationals do. So UNRWA provides schooling, healthcare, relief and social services. Basically functions as kind of a government for these people without a government.”

Julia’s experiences in Zambia and through UNRWA gave her an introduction to the issue of forced migration. “Having those experiences makes you really think about the unsustainability of a set up like that.” Her first year at the Fletcher School made her more curious about governance. For her summer internship, she knew she “wanted to go back to the Middle East and have a kind of harder core experience.” “I wanted something a little bit realer, or more ‘field,’ in the Middle East on my CV and I wanted to look at governance.” Through Fletcher’s relationship with Mercy Corps she found an internship in Iraq.”

In retrospect, she says, “I’m really glad I did it, and I wasn’t really happy with it. That was an important experience for me to realize: what I did and didn’t want in a job. And just in terms of being in a post-conflict situation as an aid worker… it’s kind of suffocating; you can’t go anywhere alone…. There’s really a limit to the amount you can experience—the culture or the stuff you’re studying…. So that was really frustrating and it was an important thing for me… to learn about myself that I didn’t want to be within an international NGO in a post-conflict space, even though that’s what I’m interested in on a higher level.”

“It was definitely interesting learning a lot more about the relationship between the Kurds and the rest of the Iraqis, and the obstacles to engaging in the government and to engaging with each other. The system that was set up there just inhibits cooperation or reconciliation, or any type of communal investment in Iraq as one state. The fact that the government is divided along ethno-sectarian lines and, like Lebanon in some ways, it’s becoming this regional battleground for political and ideological influence, like Iran is creeping in through Baghdad and Turkey is weirdly allying with the Kurds. So it was a fascinating experience for seeing the geopolitics play out there. It was also again disheartening to see just how many blockages there were to cooperation and just what a prominent role the US has played in setting up that system that inhibits a national identity.”

“On a day-to-day level, I didn’t really like the work; there wasn’t much to do…. I became really good friends with a couple of journalists who started the only two independent news outlets in Kurdistan: Hawlati and Awena. And hearing their stories about being kidnapped and threatened by the government, getting to know that intellectual community in Kurdistan and seeing the degree of persecution, that’s what really sparked my interest in the communication/media/information access side of governance. So that I think was more valuable than the actual internship.”

Julia is now working on her master’s thesis using research she did while in Northern Iraq. It’s currently titled “The obstacles to greater civic participation in Post-Baathist Iraq.” And it’s a critique of US development policy, particularly civil society development, in Iraq “as a more covert and innocuous foreign policy strategy.” She is arguing that “the way in which USAID and the State Department are facilitating these development efforts is actually inhibiting the development of Iraq in a peaceful and cooperative way,” which “will ultimately undermine the United States’ foreign policy objectives in the long-term.”

In a few months, Julia will graduate from the Fletcher School. And while she’s really interested in the media sector and could see herself one day working at Al Jazeera, she worries she doesn’t have enough exposure and experience yet. Right now she’s aiming to work on governance issues in the Middle East as a consultant to governments.

Julia’s Reflection on Why She Is Taking This Class
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Fun Facts

• Update on Louis: “He went into the military…. He was in Iraq and now he’s back and he’s working in the South and he has a girlfriend and baby…. We still talk to him often and he’s still a big part of our lives.
• What you wouldn’t know about Julia from the internet (until now): “I’m clearly not always defined by the work I do and what I study. I do a lot of yoga. I work in a yoga studio between Harvard and Central Square. I love music. I go to concerts all the time. That’s also something that’s been influenced by my dad and my brother, who are both passionate about music.”
• Where the handle “seahorseunicorn” came from: “That was from high school. It was just a name that my friend and I came up with when I did the Last.fm profile…. And I made it my Flickr—even though I don’t think I’ve ever posted any pictures to Flickr—so that I could save that name, because one of my friends told me I should make it now otherwise someone else would use it, even though I’m sure noone else would take that username. It has no significance. I just thought it was goofy when I was an 18-year-old girl.”

Click to watch Sunrise Boston on YouTube

At about 6:13am on February 26, 2013, I hit the record button on my camera and shot 20 minutes of slow moving sun and clouds. This is the result at 800 times speed.

The sunrise was scheduled for 6:24am. But light is already painting the Boston skyline from my vantage point on the 6th floor of the MIT Media Lab. We are facing Southeast. The Berkeley Building (also known as at the Old Hancock Building) with its distinctive spire, sits a couple of lesser buildings to the left of the 790foot apex of the newer Hancock Place. The right of our frame is dominated by the buildings of the Prudential Center, with 111 Huntington Avenue and its porous dome next to the Prudential Building’s 749foot prominence.

The backdrop of this skyline is the vertical rainbow cast each morning by the sunrise. A phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering causes the white light from the sun to split across the sky according to its constituent wavelengths. The shorter wavelengths of blue and violet scatter the furthest through the atmosphere to create our blue sky (since we don’t see violet so well). The longer wavelengths of yellow, orange, and down to red stay close to their source on the horizon.

The temperate this morning hung around freezing with an average wind speed of 3miles per hour. And so we see the smoke from some industrial exhaust pipe holding formation as is rises in the air center frame. A facilities worker stops by my stakeout, in front of the terrace windows, and notes the same plume of smoke. “It’s going to be a nice, calm day,” he says.

I smile as the sunrise finally casts direct light on the undersides of the puffy cloud of smoke, mottling it in pinks and purples like cotton candy. I start to notice the sounds of the city, more traffic passing nearby.

It’s dawn again in Boston and here across the Charles River in Cambridge, at 42 minutes 36 seconds latitude. Tomorrow, the sunrise will be a few moments earlier as the Earth pulls its northern half slowly out of winter.

Mele had earlier cited Swartz’s “moral suasion” as the characteristic which seems to align him with the high principle and high calibre journalist Patterson. This resonated with my current thinking on journalism, which has been to try and reduce journalism down to its basic elements, not unlike Kovach and Rosenstiel attempt to do. What I find is a set of principles and processes, traditionally embodied and practiced by the institutions of the newspaper and the profession, whose members we call journalists. However, I believe these institutions can be separated from the elements of journalism and reconstituted as a civic skill set, exemplified by Swartz at his best, which is to say the pursuit of knowledge, openness, and democracy through principled practice.

In their introduction to The Elements of Journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel argue, “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.” And, “The first task of the new journalist/sense maker […] is to verify what information is reliable and then order it so people can grasp it efficiently.” The authors underline their argument with two theories: journalism should have a theory of democracy and should address the “interlocking public.” When talking about a theory of democracy, they refer to a debate between Walter Lippman and John Dewey over the goal of democracy. According to the authors, Dewey claimed the goal “was not manage public affairs efficiently,” but rather “to allow people to develop to their fullest potential.” Kovach and Rosenstiel suggest that Lippman’s view is still driving journalism today, and resulting in appeals to the elite managers. They imply that a better theory of democracy may be one that fits a broader public looking to actualize.

Their Theory of Interlocking Publics suggests that the audience for journalism comprises a spectrum of expertise and interest in any given story, which could be completely reversed for another story (i.e. the farmer who is interested and expert in agriculture news may be disinterested and novice in healthcare news). Appealing to this interlocked public is the challenge of the journalist in writing their story. If your theory of democracy is Lippman’s than you write for the interested experts, the elite managers. But if it’s Dewey’s, you aim to write a story that appeals to the broadest possible audience: a little something for everyone.

Kovach and Rosenstiel’s main fear is the rise of “market-based journalism,” which is more capitalistic than democratic, and niche rather than appealing to the broader interlocking public. Such journalists respond to the economics of writing this or that content rather than to principle. They cite three factors as contributing to this trend: the nature of new technology to disassociate news from geography and therefore community, conglomeration forcing news businesses to be subsumed and deprioritized by parent companies, and globalizations reducing the variety of news content to appeal across cultures. Certainly when I look at examples like The AOL Way, I agree that this is a considerable source of concern. But as someone who generally enjoys the bit of celebrity drivel or list of cute cat pictures, I’m more concerned about the continued concentration, and essentially outsourcing, of the principles and practices of journalism, to what’s left of the journalism industry.

I’ve argued before, that the “participation gap” forecasts a new inequality in democratic participation between those that are skilled enough to amplify their voice via new media and engage in emerging political fora online, and those that are not. (Digital literacy divides have been empirically confirmed since then.) The perspective that Kovach and Rosenstiel maintain is that journalism is something that is wrapped up in institutions who produce journalism. While they throw a bone to citizen participation in journalism by allowing for dialogue with the audiences as “an integral part of the story as it evolves,” they fail to realize that the most effective way to “provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing” may be to teach those citizens to be journalists themselves. I’m not advocating here for a techno-utopian vision where everyone is the producer of their own news. Instead, I’m interested in teaching journalism’s principles and practices to youth in the same way we force them to learn how a bill becomes a law in high school civics. Contemporary journalists should be at the heart of this effort. They should be the teachers in the classroom coordinating journalistic learning projects. Our class is a good model for this; as are student newspapers in high schools and colleges across the country. Committing acts of journalism are like committing acts of democracy. Dewey’s theory of democracy is best experienced, as is engagement with a broader (interlocked) public: the communities that Kovach and Rosenstiel feel like we’re losing in a digitized and globalized age.

As Mele observes, we need more nerds like Aaron, who embody the same principles and processes as a credible journalistic institution.

Epilogue
I also believe teaching journalism as a civic skill set not only makes the “audience” better prepared to self-govern, but more likely to appreciate professional journalism when they come across it. It’s simply good for business. I for one still love reading the news.

Dan Gillmor in We the Media suggests that the age of journalism and the professional journalist as the broadcaster and arbiter of truth is over, that participatory media allows for the natural conversation between the journalist and the former audience combine expertise and produce journalism together through dialogue, and pull rather than push. I agree with Gillmor that a new journalism is both possible and necessary in this age but I don’t think we are there yet. In fact, I know we aren’t there yet because I still get (and prefer to get) the majority of my news from traditional journalistic institutions. I subscribe to The Economist because I know I get a quality product filled with international news and tightly edited perspective that I can rely on, even if I don’t always agree with it. The reason why I still rely on news sources like The Economist is because I can count on the established norms of credibility for journalism embodied by the traditional news institution; there is not a good alternative system for determining and establishing credibility or authority from “expert” blogs and social media. Perhaps, I can use the wisdom of the crowds to find technical advice on programming from StackOverflow, the funniest new memes by karma on reddit, or even a quick introduction to the history of Sumo on Wikipedia, but for current events on any given topic I still rely on news organizations.

We need the equivalent of a public avowal of The Elements of Journalism for (citizen) journalists. A good model has been proposed by bloggers like David Weinberger, who prominently links to his “Disclosure Statement.” Web rings used to provide a kind of a referral network to validate sites that were deemed relevant and worthy to be members of the community of circularly linked websites. Which brings us back to the hyperlink, long used as a proxy for credibility online either by simple citation or by creating a directional network graph among webpages that can power measures of influence and validity like Google’s PageRank algorithm. We need another nerd like Aaron to devise a better system.

RescueTime
RescueTime offers three views of increasing granularity. For me, Email is king, followed by my vices of Reference and News, which can be somewhat interchangeable, then my social networking vices which are later broken out into Facebook and Reddit and Twitter. After accounting for videos (YouTube mostly) and games (I’m a sucker for a good puzzle plat former like Continuity), you get actual work: Writing and Evernote, random Business tasks. Shopping shows up here only because I was buying books for classes and research on Amazon and I badly need a new pair of sneakers.

Erhardt's General Categories Graph (RescueTime)

Erhardt's Detailed Categories Graph (RescueTime)

Erhardt's Specific Activities Graph (RescueTime)

Snapshot of Browser Activity
Using a Firefox add-on Voyage which allows you to explore your browser history as a wall of media, I was able to dig a little into my behavior in 30 minutes blocks and uncover some of the true freneticism of web browsing and the wormhole like time-suck that comes from portals like Google News, Wikipedia, and Reddit. So here is a snapshot from yesterday morning: 9:00am-9:30am (read it from right to left). I started off by reading a New York Magazine piece on Aaron Swartz. Then I checked Facebook and Google News, the latter led me to read about the proposal to drop wrestling from the Olympics. Modern pentathlon was on the list to be axed as well so I did a Google search for that in order to quickly get to the Wikipedia page where I read about its history. Then came Reddit: most of the bubbles without favicons were images submitted to a thread about whether or not eye color makes people significantly more attractive. Then I was back to Facebook, in which I apparently visit 46 pages while I looking into the relationship of a friend of mine with his fiancee, whom he had just proposed to according to the site.

Erhardt's Browsing History Snapshot from Feb. 12, 2013 (Voyage)

Offline Media Summary

• Books: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, read an average of 8 pages before sleep during 3 of the past 6 nights; Readings for this class, 2 hours; Readings for my Intro to Networks class, 1 hour
• Newspapers/Magazines: Weekly print Economist subscription, read an average of 5 articles a day, mostly on the T to and from the Media Lab; The Tech picked up from stand in the Media Lab, read cover to cover last week’s issue between classes
• Television: Downton Abbey, Sunday ritual with my fiancee, watched 2 hours; Jeopardy, watched 3 episodes in past week after making dinner; The Taste, cooking competition show, watched between Jeopardy and The State of the Union last night, 1 hour; The State of the Union and Republican Response, watched approximately 2 hours
• Podcasts: Listen to an average of 1 hour per day when I exercise at home in the morning, 7 episodes of The Moth, 2 episodes of This American Life, 1 episode of On the Media
• Music: 95 songs from 10 albums played while working or browsing the web, captured using last.fm scrobbler (see below)

Erhardt's Music by Album Graph (last.fm)

Reflections on Media Diarying
1) Measurement bias is a bitch
2) It’s not what it looks like, but it kind of is, maybe
3) Holy crap, email

When I embarked on this assignment my first step was to search for any kind of tool similar to RescueTime that would automate the collection of my media consumption behavior. This was important to me not only because I thought it would help me quantify my behavior but also because I wanted something so lightweight that it wouldn’t disrupt my actual consumption. Putting on my sociologist hat, I’m familiar with the range of biases that are introduced by various quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. Two common ones are the observer effect and the social desirability effect. The observer effect results in subjects changing their behavior due to the fact that they are being watched. The social desirability effect is a specific example of the observer effect when a subject adjusts their behavior to come across how they think they should come across in terms of societal norms and values. In terms of keeping a media diary, this means that I might change my media consumption because I want to appear like I’m a very productive person who has perfect self-control and does not indulge in frivolous media. OR, this means that I might simply avoid consuming media at times where its inconvenient to me to record that media since I’m also the observer and I’m feeling a bit lazy (happened a few times with non-digital media). So in this week, I strove to do exactly when I would normally do and hope that I could record as much of that as possible automatically and just not think about it too much. This is imperfect and certainly an underestimate of my media consumption in a number of ways. One example is that I used a Firefox add-on called Reddit Enhancement Suite which allows me to visit the media linked to by Reddit right on the page as I scroll through: this means the number of cute cat pictures and AdviceAnimal memes that I actually consumed is completely lost in the measly 28 pages I scrolled through on Reddit which were actually recorded.

Many of the tools for automatically quantifying media consumption also reduce the media to sources: i.e. YouTube (84 videos), Facebook (132 pages), GoogleDocs (31 pages), etc. So when I’m watching a YouTube video that’s relevant to my research, which involves studying media, it gets counted the same as that Harlem Shake video that was linked from Reddit. Furthermore, while that Harlem Shake parody was very distracting at the time in the context of the work I was or should have been doing when I watched it, the sum total of Harlem Shake videos I have consumed inform my understanding of a cultural phenomenon which is relevant to my research as a media scholar AND my cultural capital in the Bourdieuian sense: something that I personally value and can be exchanged for social and economic capital when others value my knowledge of it. This cuts against the prevailing notion of “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” That said, I have a certain occupation and social milieu that values the consumption of YouTube videos, which may not be true of others. And certainly the primary education movement in the 1990s of any reading is good reading has been shown to have been flawed. My more formal literacy may help me digest and appreciate a broader swath of media in ways that are particularly productive. OR I’m part of a doomed generation that justifies its frivolous media consumption through complicated rationalities. Relativism + cultural capital is my saving grace here; I should also plug deep qualitative research like ethnography and content analysis as a better way to open a window into the INTENTION behind the consumption of a piece of media, like what I did with the snapshot from Voyage. (Intention is very interesting and relevant to the research we are trying to do at the Center for Civic Media because we want to get past the concept of slacktivism when it comes to purposeful consuming and sharing of media.)

Erhardt's Productivity Graph (RescueTime) -- Blue is good, Red is bad

Finally, there is the realm of pseudo-productivity in the opposite direction: email. RescueTime tells me that I spend the majority of my screen-staring time on my email client, 7.5 hours in the past week! Email is simultaneously how everything and nothing gets done in the knowledge society and workplace. Studies have shown that email produces shots of chemicals in the brain that either excite you or terrify you depending on your disposition; either way they keep you coming back for more. Plus, sending off emails are quick wins in terms of check offs on to-do lists: hit send and you’ve done something! In the past week, I have sent out at least 50 email messages. I have received many more than that. There are numerous recommendations floating out there about managing email deluge: scheduled email checks with specific time limits once or twice a day, converting inboxes to priority order rather than chronological, and simply unsubscribing from anything that seems to hurt more than it helps. I’ve tried all of these at various times to no avail. There is also the oft-cited law that states–the more email you send, the more email you receive–which seems inescapable.

Something that I’m really curious about the future is how media consumption will change in terms of behavioral patterns and its meaning socially, culturally, and in terms of productivity when wearable technology is our main digital media source and is ubiquitous. Think of Google Glass as the closest approximation: I’m interested in what our media landscape will look like when we consume it through the lens of augmented reality. Will it break down the silos of media: away from YouTube, email, news websites, etc.? Can I have exchanges that perform the function of email but not in this way that takes us out of our productive spaces? And then will we develop cognitive mode-switching techniques will fill in to help us distinguish one mode (email) from another mode (video watching). How will this change the patterns and diversity of media we consume: will it look like push or pull or some new yet-to-be-experienced form?