I’m back from the computational journalism symposium at Georgia Tech. It was fantastic. I only wish I had a better cell phone to twitter/take photos and a better computer so I could have live blogged the whole thing.
But the point of this post is to take a step back and consider what I just learned.
- First: I’m back to the age-old question of what we call all this.
My friends joke that I’m a "blogger" and if I don’t want to get into it – I laugh it off. But I’m not a blogger. Nor am I a ‘citizen journalist.’ I work in citizen journalism – but I am a full-time professional journalist. I study community management and online organizing. I consider journalistic standards and ethics and weigh them against the barriers to user-participation. I ponder journalism practices and wonder how the internet can enable, bolster and increase them.
So what do you call my job? Am I a "computational journalist"?
Computational Journalism brings up images of database journalism or hard core algorithms to determine the news ala Google News and Digg. All this is true, but computational journalism is a wide net. If it only referred to acts of journalism where computers carried the entire load I would have had no business being at the symposium (I can’t code) nor would Michael Skolar or dozens of others in the audience.
I have to admit, I was a bit nervous that there would be no room for people like me: I tend to route around what I can’t code by using free web applications. While I consider it rather clever of me, I fear some programmers would snicker. To the contrary, I found out, that’s something programmers admire – and perhaps something all journalism organizations need to learn about.
What I found, however, was that everyone in attendance agreed: Journalists can benefit from programmers and vice-versa.
As I have always thought about it: The practice of journalism has three phases: (a. Collect information (b. Filter information and (c. present information.
Computers can dramatically alter how we do any one of those steps. But to do all three and weave them together still takes the gentle care of a real-live journalist.
- I met lots of cool people
Some of these people/panelists
- For visual communication Martin Wattenberg
- For new Citizen Journalism site: AllVoices (who is getting an open invitation to blog at NewAssignment.net)
- Michael Skolar: I have met and spoken with Andrew Haeg before. I’m a big fan of what MPR is doing, which in my mind is perfecting the art of targeted crowdsourcing.
- Lila King and other CNN peeps: Who, despite my constructive criticism, don’t hate me. I don’t think CNN is in this just to get "cool cred." Judging from my quick interactions – I think Lila and company really want to figure out how to bring CJ into the network.
- Rich Gordan – Really curious to see what comes out of his scholarship to teach programmers about journalism.
- Gary Kebbel – is as rocking as I expected.
Really it’s not fair to list some of the highlights – because the whole thing was fantastic. I especially enjoyed my panel with Cliff Lamp and Anton Kast. In my opinion – these two people are both geniuses and I’m the lucky dope-of-a-journalist that got to sit next to them. Although I’m happy that the conversation turned to social news sites, a topic that I am openly covering almost all the time as it pertains to an act of citizen journalism. When I get back from Miami I hope to contact Anton Kast again to see if I could get a tour of Digg’s offices in S.F. In some ways that would be the ultimate blog post for me.
What now?
It’s time to catch-up and get ready for WeMedia.
At WeMedia there will probably be less of a focus on technology and computing power – more about the social aspects of media and how they play out. I’m really looking forward to it and I hope that upon my return I’ll have that much more to offer to NewAssignment’s beat blogging project and NewsTrust.net
interesting stuff, dave, i’ve never heard the term “computational journalism.” i’m glad to hear you talk about the feeling of being somehow lesser because you can’t code. I think about this a lot as a journalist — i sometimes i wonder if i’m drifting too far from my strengths/experience (i.e. writing, editing, production, etc) and too far over into being a silicon valley wanna be. I guess the next gen of journalists will all be computer programmers, i don’t know. anyways, looking forward to meeting you at we Media day after tomorrow!
Sounds like an interesting conference Dave. I think computational journalism sounds way to stuffy, maybe it would be appropriate if the process was automated but lets not get all sci-fi. Interesting that Wattenberg was there, he is a major player in the world of visualization and datasthetics!
Hey Dave, great meeting you at the conference at Ga Tech. Enjoyed reading your thoughts here about the symposium.
Lot’s of great people at the event.
I’ll be writing more about the event on my blog in the morning (www.davideckoff.com)
I don’t know if the term computational journalism will take hold. As one commenter here said, it does sound a bit standoffish.
But it was a really great conference and one of the titles they used does work for me: computation + journalism.
I think both ends of that equation have a lot to offer each other and people will be like a scatter chart around topic (hey, I’m getting this visualization thing).
I think a computation journalist will do just as you describe: they will have the ability to find the tools they need to get the job done at hand.
THAT’s what you do…siiick. Very cogent summation of your field, it’s future, and your daily 11am to 12pm life.
You might be surprised to learn how accessible some of the “hard core algorithms to determine the news ala Google News and Digg” are. (I know I was.) There is a really fantastic book called Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran, all the sample code is publicly available here: http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=44
You could do a lot of the stuff you are interested in doing by spending about 40 focused minutes every other day learning Python, for example, and maybe a smattering of SQL (both of which are intuitive and clear). There is an excellent free book by a gifted professor here: How to Think like a (Python) Programmer, to get you started. You can learn very valuable database stuff, which really really doesn’t have to be intimidating, by using the built-in SQL engine called sqlite. For example, if you go to python.org and download the latest version for your computer platform, and enter the interpreter (or just type ‘python’ at a Mac command line), you can create a database this simply:
>>> import sqlite
>>> mydb = sqlite.connect(‘mydatabase.db’)
>>> cur = mydb.cursor()
>>> cur.execute(‘create table greetings (english, spanish, french)’)
>>> cur.execute(“insert into greetings values (‘hi’, ‘hola’, ‘bonjour’)”)
>>> cur.execute(“select * from greetings”)
>>> cur.fetchall()
[(‘hi’, ‘hola’, ‘bonjour’)]
That’s a database!
I’ve noticed you’ve mentioned you might like to learn things like Django; that is a brilliant project, but you can do all the data crunching stuff first without having to learn your way around a web framework. Once you have approaches to information you can worry about presenting it.
I would love to read a bunch of posts on whatever you do end up pursuing, I think you could be better than you might imagine much quicker than you might imagine, and there is no substitute for having a personal itch to scratch.