Computational journalism

Computational journalism can be defined as the application of computation to the activities of journalism such as information gathering, organization, sensemaking, communication and dissemination of news information, while upholding values of journalism such as accuracy and verifiability.[1] The field draws on technical aspects of computer science including artificial intelligence, content analysis (NLP, vision, audition), visualization, personalization and recommender systems as well as aspects of social computing and information science.

History of the Field

The field emerged at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006 where a course in the subject was taught by professor Irfan Essa.[2] In February 2008 Georgia Tech hosted a Symposium on Computation and Journalism which convened several hundred computing researchers and journalists in Atlanta, GA. In July 2009, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University hosted a workshop to push the field forward.[3]

In the spring of 2012, Columbia Journalism School taught a course called Frontiers of Computational Journalism for the students enrolled in their dual degree in CS and journalism. Topics covered included document vector space representation, algorithmic and social story selection (filtering), language topic models, information visualization, knowledge representation and reasoning, social network analysis, quantitative and qualitative inference, and information security. Columbia also began to offer dual-degrees in computer science and journalism. The Knight Foundation awarded $3,000,000 to Columbia University's Tow Center to continue its computational journalism program.

Syracuse University launched a masters in computational journalism in 2015, with a mission of preparing students "to be data journalists, able to work with big data sets to organize and communicate the compelling and important news stories that might be hidden in the numbers."

Stanford University launched a Computational Journalism Lab in 2015, as well as a course titled, Computational Journalism.

Computational Journalism conferences

In February 2013, the Georgia Institute of Technology held the Computational Journalism Symposium once again in Atlanta, GA.

In 2014 and 2015, Columbia University hosted the Computation + Journalism Symposium.

The Google News Lab has sponsored "Computational Journalism Research Awards" within the United States and in Europe.

Related fields

Resources

References

  1. ↑ Nick Diakopoulos A functional roadmap for innovation in computational journalism
  2. ↑ http://www.computational-journalism.com/class2008/ 2008 Course Site
  3. ↑ James T. Hamilton Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism
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