Workshop Description Much like other forms of data, documents and text provide enormous potential as a form of data to be analyzed and visualized. This workshop will introduce and discuss the ways in which textual materials (news articles, government records, social media, and other primary sources) can be worked with as data in creative and insightful ways. Participants in this workshop will be exposed to some common techniques for textual analysis and representation of documents common in contemporary practice. Participants will be led through creative exercises around the intersection of computation and language as a way to gain familiarity and comfort with this medium. The workshop will involve a bit of programming in Python to allow participants to work with, visualize, and generate text in interesting ways.
Workshop Description Twitter is not just a source of updates from friends and happenings in the local community. Instead, it is a dense network embedded with narratives of how the world is structured, including how information flows and spreads, both within and outside of communities. The platform is host to policy announcements from the President of the United States, and demonstrated in the previous election to be a hotbed of mis-/dis-information. Therefore, it is imperative that we, as journalists, know how to effectively question and interrogate the platform. This workshop will spend the day teaching students how to report on Twitter, understanding the network, individuals, communities, and how information propogates and trends.
Workshop Description Data, code and algorithms are changing systems of power in our world, often without sufficient critical assessment or accountability. Today’s journalists need to understand how these forces operate, engaging the underlying computational tools and techniques. At the same time, the ways journalists understand the world and communicate their observations to audiences are also being reshaped by the abundance of data and accessible software to surface stories. Reporters today have an incredible variety of data to work with - from a spreadsheet of Census data, to a collection of Tweets, to frames of videos, to a compendium of online political ads. This is the raw material of "computational journalism." The tools for expressing structure in these rich data sources, for finding and telling stories, can be grouped under the name "machine learning." Through this 1-day workshop, students will work with John Keefe of Quartz to explore the possibilities of Machine Learning as a form of reporting.
Workshop Description Graphical (or pictorial) presentations of data have become an almost essential part of journalistic practice. Data visualization helps us see patterns in data, and is an important tool for finding stories. Also, outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and FiveThirtyEight are publishing data visualizations that push the idea of story telling, creating new data-driven ways to inform and entertain. In this day-long workshop, students will review some basic data visualization skills--guiding you through the design process. Students will work with charts and annotation layers and learn to exploit what's unique about data. During the day, students will also help you think critically about visualizations, making them a better consumer of data graphics.
Workshop Description The last workshop in the Transparency Series takes you through techniques for looking at one or more polls over time. Join Dhrumil Mehta who is a database journalist and Pollapalooza contributor at FiveThirtyEight to get exposed to sources, tools, and strategies for working with polls — starting at the very beginning with simple random samples, and leading to the detailed models that are employed today. All the while, the workshop will emphasize how to find and tell interesting, novel stories with polls. No prior experience in statistics or data analysis is needed.
