Software is Rebooting Journalism: Data Mining and Visualization in the Public Interest
Speaker: Scott Klein and Jeff Larson, ProPublica
Date: Tuesday, October 16 2012
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: 32-144
Host: Samuel Madden and David Karger, CSAIL
Contact: Sheila Marian, x3-1996, sheila@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: ProPublica is a non-profit news outlet that
produces investigative journalism. Since they first started publishing in
2008, ProPublica has received two Pulitzer prizes -- the first
was
the first time an online outlet won one, and the second was the first time the award was given for a project that never appeared in print.
Scott Klein and Jeff Larson are from a special team
at ProPublica that makes journalism
using software instead of words and pictures. They produce "news
applications ," which are interactive
databases that let readers find what's relevant to them in a large
national phenomenon. Projects have included The Opportunity Gap
, which uses data from the U.S. Education Department to show how poverty predicts access to education in
each school district in the country; and The Message Machine
, which uses crowdsourcing and a bit of machine learning to try to reverse engineer how the political
campaigns are micro-targetting supporters in their email outreach.
Scott and Jeff will demo some of their work and talk about this new
discipline within journalism, and are eager to convince as many MIT
students as possible that the next generation of journalism may actually
belong to the engineers.
See other events happening in October 2012
