maura, mojo, et al.

Zipfian Academy: A Practical Intro to Data Science

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:47:41 -0400

Zipfian Academy: A Practical Intro to Data Science:

Hey there! If you enjoyed this post, check out our 12-week intensive data science program this fall at Zipfian Academy.

Are you a company or data scientist that would like to get involved? Give us a shout at hello@zipfianacademy.com.

There are plenty of articles and discussions on…

Looks like this could be really cool (like hackerschool bu for data —expensive, but looks like scholarships are available).

"“VII Photo Agency is pleased to announce a call for submissions for membership. Membership..."

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:15:12 -0400

“

“VII Photo Agency is pleased to announce a call for submissions for membership.

Membership will be offered only to photographers working with the highest standards of journalistic and documentary integrity, who will extend the breadth of work we currently produce and who we believe can work within the management structure of VII.

Deadline for submission: April 26, 2013.”

”

- http://www.viiphoto.com/submission.html

A series of them. (Chicago).

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:49:53 -0400

A series of them. (Chicago).

Just for fun – quick image upload from the Russia trip as Erica...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:50:12 -0400

Just for fun – quick image upload from the Russia trip as Erica and I tour the Эрмита́ж. It really does look like that.

Nice piece by PBS. Coding takes a new direction as a radical...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:56:16 -0400

Nice piece by PBS. Coding takes a new direction as a radical form of art. Processing, and more.

Reminds me of the great work Carlos Garcia at Groundworks Media Lab is up to in Detroit and Ann Arbor this year.

"When people ask what learning analytics is, I often say: It’s like Moneyball for teachers and..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:49:18 -0400

““When people ask what learning analytics is, I often say: It’s like Moneyball for teachers and students””

- -Timothy McKay, University of Michigan physics professor, open data enthusiast, and our Leaning Analytics fellowship lead.

What I’m talking about when I’m talking about Learning Analytics at Michigan.

And now, a burst of color.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:57:23 -0400

And now, a burst of color.

Sometimes when thick in the data weeds, it’s refreshing to...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:52:00 -0400

Sometimes when thick in the data weeds, it’s refreshing to take a look at the front-end. This is the mockup for the course recommender system I’ve been working on this semester with the amazing Learning Analytics team at the School of Information.

The semester is wrapping up, and the pieces of this project will all come together soon. And that will indeed be a good thing. Excitement grows.

"I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who..."

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:38:00 -0400

““I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.””

- -House of Cads: The Psycho-Social Ordeal of Reporting in Washington

I love House of Cards like most people don’t love House of Cards. But it’s important to remember the very real, very pertinent stories of female reporters (not only in Washington) that don’t make it into the mostly male minds of Hollywood screenwriters, nor to the Netflix Presents screen.

From journalism to censorship

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 10:56:00 -0400

For me, international journalism was my gateway drug to caring very deeply about information access and particularly internet censorship internationally.

Or, at least that’s what I told someone last night — as soon as I said it, I realized it was true.

Notes from the Russia trip, in which I was able to gather some reflections from policy makers and young people regarding the recent internet blacklist law soon.

-Maura

As you might imagine, there’s something indefinably...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:42:00 -0500

As you might imagine, there’s something indefinably special about a Detroit speakeasy that’s been operating continuously for 85 years.

The place has no menu, but halfway through the night owner Ron Gurdijan brought out hotdogs.

We ended the night at Cafe D’monogo’s.

-Maura

Why This Now | On Information School

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:14:00 -0500

The admission is this: When I was offered a scholarship to get my masters at University of Michigan School of Information last June, I had no idea what to do. So I did what I usually do - turn good news into anxiety very quickly.

In my head, I’d already deferred for next year. I was going to wait things out in Washington, at my beautiful house, with my wonderful friends, at the job I’d miraculously found in my field that afforded me opportunities so varied I could barely keep up. And r/washingtondc. And ONADC. And Hacks/Hackers.

I made lists of pros and cons. I organized into them into quadrants, spreadsheets. I mapped the average (mean) winter temperature of Ann Arbor, Minneapolis and Washington to see if weather patterns would reveal a clear answer as to where I should head next. Because data.

I also polled every smart person I knew, ending up with a collection of advice and questions ranging from insightful to insane:

“Information School — oh, so that’s library sciences?”

“Information School — oh, so that’s robots?”

“You should get your masters in mathematics, that’s what you’re really interested in.”

“HCI? Wait, why aren’t you going to MIT Media Lab? Why didn’t you talk to me? Here, call X at Y right now.”

When got here I met immediately with Kelly Kowatch, rockstar career counselor and resident badass - she asked me what drew me to SI. I told her, the mission. I liked the mission of the school. At the time it was this:

Connecting people, information, and technology in more valuable ways.

She said: You’re the only person to ever say that. I thought: I’m the only one to ever say something that stupid? So. Alright. That is one heck of a vague mission statement. And that’s a good thing. While vague, it started as the most important thing and remains the most important thing. Without that, I would have gone to the school that lives, thinks and breathes HCI for an intense twelve months and sends you off to Google at the end. But there was that mission statement that stuck in my head and I couldn’t shake it. Because being an infirmation professional means something bigger than understanding usability, and it’s something broader than knowing how to make sense of big numbers.

So, why this now? I’m in my 2nd semester as a MS student and still don’t know for sure why I’m here, but I’m navigating closer to an answer.

The answer has to do with this:

News consumption is a user experience, but HCI people aren’t talking about it and neither are journalists and programmers don’t much either. It’s time to push hard on that one and not let up.
Programming is the new literacy, so keep your nose to the grind and allow yourself to learn to think in Python for quite some time.
Data journalism is insanely hard to do well, and now is the best time to learn - because you didn’t do it yesterday.
Because information silos are real, government imposed censorship is happening today, because information policy doesn’t keep pace with innovation.

Sometimes I make charts to understand things so here is a chart of that for you:

And all of this is information. And it’s not even a little part of all that is information, but they’re the strands I can’t not think about. The stuff that keeps me up. I needed a home where maybe people would stay up with me in the dark. I’m not an archivist, and I’m not a librarian. But I am closer to understanding the people that are, because at a high-level, the same stuff keeps a lot of us awake. We care about information access. We care about justice. We care about pushing the conversation forward and creation and collection and dispersion and humans. I am startled and continually awed by the company I’ve found in a place I get to call home.

Definitely a list worth reading. washingtonpoststyle: Our own...

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 11:04:48 -0400

Definitely a list worth reading.

washingtonpoststyle:

Our own David Finkel, writer-editor extraordinaire, has won a genius grant.

“I like to think this is an endorsement of long-form journalism, in which you stay long enough to tell the story,” he said about the MacArthur Foundation’s grant.

A Finkel reading list: His book “The Good Soldiers,” and the amazing Iraq dispatch from which it grew. Also his Pulitzer-Prize-winning series on exporting democracy to Yemen, this most excellent profile of Larry King from way back, a searing love story from a Kosovar refugee camp, and an immersive feature on living at minimum wage. As an editor, he captained this series of profiles centered on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.

Photo by Jonathan Newton (The Washington Post)

New Tools in the Newsroom (post in progress)

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:58:00 -0400

Keeping in mind the objectives and challenges identified in this week’s presentations by Shazna Nessa and Mohamed Nanabhay, how does your project take into account the need to facilitate collaboration in the newsroom (whether real or virtual), while acknowledging that team members will have varying technological skill sets?
— MozNewsLab blog post prompt, take three.

At it’s core and this goes without saying for so many of our projects- this is a tool for users. Anyone can be a user, not just a reporter or someone in a newsroom. But this is something newsrooms could find useful, so let’s unpack possible ways to implement it at that level first.

To look at implementation, let’s first unpack who might find this useful and why.

A> Reporters looking to investigate the Filter Bubble story itself

The story of personalized search is still one will ill-defined edges, and ill-defined potential pratfalls and triumphs. First and foremost, Pop! could be used in the newsroom to better understand fill out the edges of the personalized search story. Eli Pariser’s book serves as a starting point for examining a potential problem. There are plenty of people in camps who think he’s rightish and wrongish, but we still don’t have a clear picture of the problem (even though “view customizations” is getting there.) While it’s meta, it also gives a newsroom a clearly defined and immediate goal in using a new technology - an important task for bringing anyone on board to use a new tool.

In the same manner that the Guardian took with Click, at the micro-level, newsrooms could use the tool in their own research to understand the filter bubble/personalized search story.

One of my primary takeaways from Monday’s lecture:

Don’t let frustration poison you. Let frustration be part of your challenge. -Shazna

This goes equally for anyone attempting to introduce new technology, and for folks who are having new tech introduced to them. I work in a small, active non-profit newsroom. When introducing new technology into the newsroom, I find that there are a few things that guarantee non-use of said technology:

1> Goals of x technology aren’t grasped.

At the most basic level - we have the Filter Bubble story to investigate.

2> No one sets aside time to learn how to x technology.

Since this project would potentially exist as a Firefox add-on, the best place to start would be to sit down and discuss basics and install a few Firefox add-ons. They can be fun, or, better yet, add-ons that solve a problem. Once familiar with the process of downloading and using an add-on, we can move into the space of downloading and using this one in particular.

3> “Kirk/Scotty Syndrome”

In the sense that people who have the tech down cold aren’t talking to the people who don’t. This goes for initial trainings but also as stories and usage progress. Even if developers aren’t in house, I’ve seen its helpful to have a dedicated person in-house who can translate and communicate users issues to the developers, even if developers aren’t in-house to move forward.

Thoughts?

-@mauramaura

On communication and knowledge sharing, from narrow to broad.

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:57:00 -0400

A primary takeaway from John Resig’s excellent lecture this week:

We can’t build better communication tools if we aren’t talking to each other.

I’ve been considering this point in a few ways. From narrow to broad:

1> How it relates to “Pop! - The Filter Bubble Project” (Don’t worry, the name is tentative.)

Shareability was always going to be an important in constructing the Filter Bubble Project - one of the goals of the project is to promote a clearer idea of exactly how personalized our results are. Much like the BBC Click listeners who gathered together on a Facebook page to share & compare search results. But the vital part here is cutting the number of steps in half. Instead of 1> searching 2> taking a screenshot of the search 3> logging into Facebook 4> signing up for the Click group 5> uploading the screenshot. The idea is this: 1> search 2> share your search using said filter bubble app. The hope is that the decrease in the number of steps will lead to an increase in the amount of results shared.

2> Relating to MoJo generally

We’re typically given advice to ignore the concurrent chat box streaming by during lectures. That’s pretty sound advice, and advice I never listen to. For John Resig’s lecture last week, neglecting that advice paid off.

While John was making some stellar points in actually operationalizing the term “engagement,” highlighting what it can look like for our projects, and pounding home the importance of documentation, I felt like he was talking to an audience that isn’t me (yet). As if the assumed audience had much more technical prowess than I do, an audience with knowledge/experience in building powerful open-source projects, and an audience that would write the documentation, not have to hopelessly keep it by their bedside in hopes of gleaning insight from it to move their project/learning process forward.

That said, if I felt like sections of the presentation were over my head, the complementary streaming comments were busily fulfilling the role of “documentation” for the lecture. I think we’ve seen this several times in the lectures, but the knowledge process went something like this:

3> Communication/knowledge sharing - part of building a new ladder?

Talking with my Senior Editor Tom Hundley, we found ourselves discussing paths into journalism. During Tom’s 36 year career in journalism, he moved from a small town newspaper to bigger US based newspapers and then on to the Chicago Tribune where he served as a foreign correspondent from 60 countries for twenty years before coming on as at the Pulitzer Center. In discussing his path, he said something to the effect of: I climbed a ladder to get where I am, but now I think the rungs are gone. It seems like MoJo can and does help rebuild the rungs, particularly for technically-inclined (“aspiring hackers?”) journalists. If the Knight News Challenge is a high rung on the ladder, where does MoJo fit, and what are the others?

Thoughts?

-@mauramaura

MoJo Week 1: Primary takeaways, problems in ambiguity/ambiguity in problems.

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:03:00 -0400

“If the problem you are trying to solve requires a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.” -Aza Raskin

Developing a clear understanding of a problem assumes we can agree 1> there is a problem. The next part is 2> refining that problem, so 3> we can begin to draft a scalable solution.

In scouring the proposals that initially came along with the call for ideas, I was struck by the number of ideas attempting to create highly personalized news models. The initial proposal I came to the table with: “Popping the Filter Bubble” was a brief write-up (note: if the term “Filter Bubble” isn’t ringing a bell, I’d suggest 1> this TED Talk, and 2> Evgeny Morovoz’s book review/analysis.) Pariser recently helped to reignite a conversation surrounding potential dangers of personalized news and information streams, highlighting a concern that a narrow junk-food based media and information diet can have negative political and cultural ramifications.

What the problem isn’t:
Personalized search in and of itself.

What this isn’t an attempt to do:
Break or reveal super-secret algorithms.
Force “information vegetables” all day everyday.

But, it would be awesome to:
1> Bring more transparency to the filtering process. 2> Promote an understanding that gatekeepers in news and information dissemination haven’t disappeared. The gatekeepers have moved, and the gatekeepers look different, and sometimes they look like algorithms.

So:
Let’s bring more of the known factors filtering our search results to the forefront in a way that is obvious, and see if we can’t manage, play with, change and easily share our results when we alter that information. So, see below how it’s remarkably easy to test how our our top results are altered when we change our location data - for instance,

My search results this morning (7/18) for “chocolate” (Washington, DC):

And “chocolate” (Manually changed location to Minneapolis, Minnesota):

What would be exciting:

For there to be away to do this with more than just location, so some of the other 57 factors featured into the search process. (Factors like: what sort of browser you’re using and what version, how large your text is, etc…) then: it would be excellent to make those results easily and immediately shareable.

Problems in execution:
I call myself an “aspiring coder” because the term is both at once full of promise and impossibly vague. To be clear, I would have no idea how to accomplish any of this, but would absolutely be interested in hearing your thoughts as to feasibility. If it’s impossible, maybe there’s some more refined way to make it work.

In terms of practicality:
It’s a bit easier to discuss this problem conceptually, and more difficult in terms of practicality. While there have been some not altogether scientific experiments examining differences in search, the borders of the problem/issue remain fuzzy.

Coming ~~soon~~ later today, 7/18:
Visuals, bearing in mind the “just build it” mantra we’ve been hearing and attempting to internalize.

-@mauramaura

Thoughts?

harry potter + propublica timeline setter? yes, and yes.

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:22:19 -0400

harry potter + propublica timeline setter? yes, and yes.:

There are lots of ugly super clunky Harry Potter timelines in the world. And I was looking at them, because I was procrastinating. And that lead me to procrastinate some more and combine two fandoms — Propublica and Harry Potter! this was the result. :)

"If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into..."

Tue, 17 May 2011 21:28:28 -0400

“If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what’s this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That’s not about web design. That’s a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.”

- -Jay Rosen.

good to think about. esp. “that’s not web design. that’s w hole category in journalism that fear we do not understand at all.” we don’t understand it. we need to get there, get there better, and more often.

"newsflick: So much emotions: Japan’s PM, Naoto Kan, leaves the headquarters of the Tokyo Electric..."

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:39:26 -0400

“newsflick: So much emotions: Japan’s PM, Naoto Kan, leaves the headquarters of the Tokyo Electric Power Co, owners of the Fukushima plant, after meeting staff. (AFP/Getty Images)”

- World News

abcworldnews: A Japanese home is seen adrift in the Pacific...

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:37:17 -0400

abcworldnews:

A Japanese home is seen adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Ships and aircraft from the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group are searching for survivors in the coastal waters near Sendai, Japan. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Dylan McCord/Released)

This picture continues to amaze us.