Monday, December 19, 2011

A breakthrough in data visualization, what it means for data journalism, predicting the news



Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation announced a new system to help researchers make sense of stores of scientific papers, and potentially find the “next big thing.”

The Action Science Explorer, or ASE, developed jointly by University of Michigan and University of Maryland faculty, takes a difficult cognitive task -- backtracking through paper citations to identify a breakthrough -- and “offloads” it to the much easier task of perceiving density in network visualizations. In other words, it takes mounds of difficult to digest research, and uses social network analysis techniques and graphing to make the information immediately recognizable.

The ASE visually represents papers and concepts as they appear over time, identifies the moment where fields branched out and flourished, and also finds moments where other research became obsolete or lost. It also identifies emerging fields of study:

“Users can quickly appreciate the strength of relationships between groups of papers and see bridging papers that bring together established fields. Even more potent for those studying emerging fields is the capacity to explore an evolutionary visualization using a temporal slider. Temporal visualizations can show the appearance of an initial paper, the gradual increase in papers that cite it, and sometimes the explosion of activity for ‘hot’ topics. Other temporal phenomena are the bridging of communities, fracturing of research topics, and sometimes the demise of a hypotheses.”
(from the ASE tech report)

Here’s how it works:



The ASE researchers say this software has potential in the fields of linguistics, biology and sociology, writing “Both students and educators must have access to accurate surveys of previous work, ranging from short summaries to in-depth historical notes. Government decision-makers must learn about different scientific fields to determine funding priorities.”

But suppose data journalists use similar tools to analyze legislation over time, to forecast future bills and political alliances. Clusters would indicate where certain provisions failed, where lobbyists and special interests had influenced legislation the most, and possibly how those interests would proceed in the future. Instead of conducting reactionary reporting, or relying on too-late intelligence that lets legislation slip through unnoticed, reporters could use the system to help guide questions and investigations.

In September, computer scientist Kalev Leetaru here on the University of Illinois campus did something just as remarkable. He compiled more than 100 million media reports, text-mined and crunched them in a supercomputer, and was able to chart and even predict the instability in Libya and Egypt.

Impressively, Leetaru was also able to use those news reports to estimate the location of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Ladin with a 200km degree of accuracy. From the BBC news, who reported on Leetaru’s research:
The computer event analysis model appears to give forewarning of major events, based on deteriorating sentiment.
However, in the case of this study, its analysis is applied to things that have already happened.
According to Kalev Leetaru, such a system could easily be adapted to work in real time, giving an element of foresight.
"That's the next stage," said Mr Leetaru, who is already working on developing the technology.
"It looks like a stock ticker in many regards and you know what direction it has been heading the last few minutes and you want to know where it is heading in the next few.
“Predictive reporting” or “news forecasting” could prove invaluable to digital newsrooms, where seconds mean the difference between breaking the news and just being one of the reporting mob. And if news agencies work on integrating advances in computer and information science into the office, instead of just reporting on them, it could enhance reporting across the entire organization.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Founding a Professional Society of Drone Journalists


It’s been quite a month for drones. After Iranian armed forces captured one of the coveted American RQ170 stealth drones, the very same stealth drone that pierced Pakistani airspace to spy on Osama bin Laden, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman released previously unpublished photos of the carnage that U.S. military drones unleashed in Waziristan.

Later, the Los Angeles Times wrote about how the U.S. Customs and Boarder Protection lent a Predator B drone to North Dakota law enforcement. Sheriffs in Nelson County, N.D., fearing a search for missing cattle would end with deadly firefight with a “sovereign citizen” group, spied on the group and arrested members after the drone revealed they were unarmed. The report went on to reveal that local law enforcement had used Predators stationed at the Grand Forks Air Base for at least two dozen surveillance flights since June, and the FBI and DEA have used Predators in their own investigations.

Salon’s Glen Greenwald warned of the expansion of domestic drones, and the sizable lobbying power of drone contractors in Congress, writing “the escalating addition of drones — weaponized or even just surveillance — to the vast arsenal of domestic weapons that already exist is a serious, consequential development. The fact that it has happened with almost no debate and no real legal authorization is itself highly significant.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post dedicated its December 4 front page to the Israeli military’s use of drones in Gaza. But one Post reporter asked the question that journalists like me have been wondering for some time: What’s the potential use for drones in journalism?

Melissa Bell’s piece, “Drone journalism? The idea could fly in the U.S.” mentions my writing on a drone journalism Google group, where I mention that drone technology could help journalists “to take water or air samples or to scan for topographical data to make assessments about industrial impact on the environment.”

Bell mentioned Matt Waite, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and developer of Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact, who just began the world’s first drone journalism lab. Waite unveiled his plan for a drone journalism lab at a News Foo conference, where the immediate reaction was skepticism.

“News Foo had a number of tech people very interested in and sensitive to privacy issues and they were quite wary,” Waite told data journalist Ben Welsh. “They immediately went to TMZ+Lindsay Lohan as an example of how drones could be misused.

“So when I started thinking about this idea, I immediately thought that people would rightfully be wary of this and that the sooner we started talking about ethics and laws, the sooner we could have answers for criticisms and guidelines to balance the public’s right to know and people’s expectations of privacy.”

I was unaware of Waite’s announcement, or his drone journalism lab, until the WaPo story. But given the most spectacular breach of journalism ethics in recent history (the News of the World/NewsCorp phone hacking scandal), it was not lost on me how important it would be to establish a code of ethics for drone journalists. The code of ethics would be deliberated and drawn up by experts in the field, similar to the way the Society of Professional Journalists developed and supported its code of ethics.

To that end, I purchased Dronejournalism.org as the future home of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists (PSDJ). At the time of this post, the website is dominated by a placard that displays the mission statement of the PSDJ: “Dedicated to developing the ethical, educational and technological framework for the emerging field of drone journalism.”

I also called Waite to bounce ideas about the first professional organization for drone journalists. One of his ideas was that the organization pursues a code of ethics via Wiki-style collaboration, but that the collaboration should only involve experts and practitioners of drone journalism. He, too, realized the need for an organization to help pull down a concrete ethical framework for journalists.

“This is really cool on one side, really creepy on the other,” Waite said in the conversation. “I think you are being dishonest if you are on the cool side, not thinking there’s something creepy about [drone journalism]. There’s a significant opportunity for mayhem and privacy violations.”

On the other hand, he said, “I think you are missing the point if you don’t see the amazing things you can do with the technology.”

For an example, Waite pointed out that Russian citizen journalists had employed an SLR-equipped drone to obtain aerial shots of a recent protest. The Daily Beast, one of the first news organizations to use a drone, surveyed tornado damage in Joplin, Missouri, and flood damage in Natchez, Mississippi and Minot, North Dakota.


Video from a citizen journalist capturing footage during Poland protests.

Waite said one of the first things he’s going to try to do with his first drones is attempt to violate his own privacy. And, of course, if the drone does violate his privacy, that would make a first case study for developing an ethical framework for drone journalism. “I could stand on a public sidewalk and see if I can’t get a drone high enough to get into my backyard with my kids with a sign that says ‘you’re violating my privacy,’” he said.

But there’s two other components to the PSDJ besides ethics: education and technology. We need to teach journalists how to use the equipment safely and effectively, and we need to keep journalists at the forefront of civil drone technology.

Waite used a $1,000 grant from the company he founded to purchase an off-the-shelf drone, the AR Drone quadcopter by Parrot, to be equipped later with a GoPro HD video recorder. Out of the box, the AR Drone provides a relatively stable platform for shooting video, and is controllable by iPhone or Android smartphone. Steve Doig, a Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist who teaches at ASU, also is experimenting with the AR Drone platform.

"You can get it at Brookstone in the mall," Waite said. "It's got an API and you can hack it. It's made of stock parts. You can controll it from your smartphone. And it's cheap."

A Parrot AR Drone in flight.

The next step for me will likely be purchasing the same drone and outfitting it in the same fashion. Not too much later, I hope to be able to develop some Arduino-based, fixed-wing aircraft to shoot photos along a predetermined path, and stitch those photos together later. But Waite and I know this is just a starting point; an inexpensive, yet effective demonstration of the concept. From there, it’s experimentation and learning.

“What I would love to do, once we have these platforms, is let’s cover some news,” Waite said.  “A house fire in your city. Spring floods. There will be tornadoes, it’s as predictable as the sun coming up. Let’s cover them and write about our experiences and through those.”

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Being a More Versatile Journalist: Data Journalism Veteran Steve Doig Wants Journalists to Know Statistics

Aerial photograph of the devastation from hurricane Andrew in 1992. Steve Doig, who was a reporter for the Miami Herald at the time, used his data journalism chops to survey the damage and write a Pulitzer-prize winning expose on construction malpractice. Earlier this year, I asked him what aspiring data journalists should be learning.

I cringe when bloggers begin a post by apologizing to readers for a lack of updates. This is partly because most people do, or should, understand that the gig doesn’t pay. But mostly, every word you waste on explaining your absence is one more chance for a reader to lose interest and go somewhere else. So I’ll just say it’s been an eventful couple of months, and tell you why it’s actually relevant to this blog.

Having just finished a master’s in journalism at the University of Illinois, I was extremely lucky to find a National Science Foundation grant that is training better K-12 science teachers.

At the grant, we do this by teaching lessons in entrepreneurial leadership to science teachers. That translates into experiences like students constructing their own spectrophotometers, or high school students manufacturing their own biofuel, or even collaborations where high school students set up demonstrations on electricity for grade school students to work through.

It’s a radical, but practical approach that hopes to improve the nation’s competitiveness in science teaching. In January, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress report card on teaching showed that 47 percent of all high school seniors in the country are deficient in the sciences.

Why would an NSF grant want a journalist? For one, I understood their language. Being a former undergraduate student of mechanical engineering, I had taken chemistry, physics, calculus, and statistics courses. Secondly, they wanted someone experienced in the ways of conducting interviews (i.e., collecting data) and translating the information into an easily digestible form (i.e., not only help write reports for the NSF but also write for public dissemination).

That was all they were looking for initially, until I mentioned I had worked with NodeXL, a template that turns Microsoft Excel into a tool for analyzing social networks. I was introduced to the program by Brant Houston, in his investigative reporting class at the university. The Excel plug-in comes in handy during an investigation when you need to do things like plot like the flow of money or political influence within organizations or among groups of people. As it turns out, the grant was conducting a first-of-its kind analysis of teaching networks and needed someone with my expertise.

The moral of this story could be that if you develop skills beyond traditional journalism in undergraduate/graduate school, it’s easier to parlay your skills into a new career when the journalism jobs market tanks. But the fact is I’m still practicing journalism, albeit during my off-hours.

I recently submitted an investigation of a local church with more than $100,000 in tax liens to CU-CitizenAccess.org, a Knight foundation-funded community news website. The investigation required digging up and looking through nonprofit tax records, federal tax liens, city ordinances, and even credit union call reports. The investigation stemmed from a legal notice I stumbled upon in the aforementioned investigative journalism class.

Rather, this is why a journalist should learn data journalism: to become a more versatile investigator.

When I was teaching introductory journalism classes to freshmen and sophomore university students, I wanted them to know exactly why it’s useful to have computer and data journalism skills. So I put together a presentation on data journalism for a lecture of about 100 students, and asked data journalism veteran Steve Doig, who is currently the Knight Chair at the Walter Cronkite school of journalism, for a few bits of advice.

Monday, September 12, 2011

What improved word clouds reveal in Obama, Bernanke jobs and economy speeches


The above is a word cloud using President Obama’s Sept. 8 address to Congress. As is customary with word clouds, the more times a word occurs in a text, the larger the font size in the cloud. Even if you weren’t aware of the nature of the speech, it’s obvious from the cloud that Obama’s address to Congress dealt with “jobs” in “America.”

But word clouds have limits. Seth Duncan, analytics director for the digital public relations firm WCG, wrote on the bynd.com blog in 2010 that the simplicity of the word cloud could contribute to a decline of reading comprehension. In his post, “Word Clouds and the Cognitive Decline of PR and Marketing,” Duncan wrote that he strongly believed “that the word cloud is the biggest enemy of deep reading and lowest form of artificial intelligence in marketing and PR.”

“You can read the content very quickly (because they don’t contain much information) and they have a unique look. I also think that word clouds can provide useful information for SEM or SEO planning. But people are fooling themselves if they think that a word cloud offers a satisfactory summary of hundreds or thousands of pages of text,” he wrote.

NYU political science PhD student Drew Conway has a similar, but different beef with word clouds. Conway looked at a word cloud, essential a plot of words in three dimensions (x, y, and font size), and saw a missed opportunity. “They are meant to summarize a single statistics—word frequency—yet they use a two dimensional space to express that,” he wrote.

His solution came from his background in statistics, which oftentimes compares two sets of data. For his improved word cloud, he compared two speeches by political figures and used the x-axis to describe the similarity between two speeches. To accomplish this, he used the free, open-source statistical programming environment R, which has a data-mining and graphics plotting features, along with some custom coding.

But what to compare the Obama jobs speech to? That same day, bankers and business executives at the Economic Club of Minnesota waited eagerly to hear the Fed Chair Ben Bernanke outline what the Fed would do to alleviate economic concerns.

Obama and Bernanke were speaking to two very different audiences, and had different objectives. Obama was speaking to a Congress hell bent on being re-elected and an anxious, under-employed American public. Meanwhile, Bernanke was speaking to titans of industry and banking. These differences shouldn’t be an excuse not to compare the two speeches; rather, both speakers are components of the administration weighing in on essentially the same issue.

Differences in their speeches could signal a difference in opinion and discord about an appropriate response, while similarities could point to ideas with a measure of political support. If nothing else, it’s worth looking at how two high-ranking officials in an administration tailor speeches on economic issues to two different audiences.

Here’s what those two speeches look like in Conway’s “better word cloud.” Click to see the plot in a higher resolution.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Hopelessness and Hope in Pilsen - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 4/4


An anti-Fisk poster hung by activists in a Pilsen Thrift store.
“And every morning was a requiem
or the feast day of a martyr -
the priest in black or red,
cortege of traffic, headlights
funneling through incense
under viaducts. While my surplice
settled around me like smoke
my father rode the blue spark
of a streetcar to the foundry
where, in the dark mornings,
the cracks of carbonized windows
flowed with the blood of stained glass.”


- Excerpt from “Autobiography,” a poem by Stuart Dybek, a Pilsen native and a 2007 recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant.”
NOTE: The following is the last in a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. It's called "Battle in the Barrio: the Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." The series is a journalistic project that culminated in a master's thesis for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Part One: Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder
Part Two: Old Problems, New Attention

Part Three: The People VS the Bottom Line

Part Four: Hopelessness and Hope in Pilsen

Visualization - Is there injustice in Pilsen?
Visualization - Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood struggles with pollution
South-side children have greatest exposure to lead in Chicago, health department data shows

If you have the time, Maria Torres has stories.

Since she became a community organizer a decade ago, helping gather signatures for petitions and lately rallying support for the Clean Power Ordinance, she’s collected quite a few.

Mostly, they involve people who’ve suddenly come down with asthma, respiratory illnesses, rare forms of cancer, lupus and other medical abnormalities.

“I have a family that lives right in front of the Perez school,” she said. “Her son was just diagnosed with asthma, and has to use an inhaler. And he’s real little. You feel for them, because they tell you how hard it is for her son to use the inhaler. It’s really hard for him because he’s a little kid and he doesn’t know how to. He just developed it, and didn’t have it before. I feel for them, I really feel for them. And it scares me.”

In addition to the verb “scares,” as in, “it scares me,” and “freaks,” as in “it freaks me out,” she frequently uses the adjectives “spooky” and “weird” to describe the magnitude of health problems she’s heard of while knocking on doors as a community organizer in Pilsen.
There’s the story she heard about an 80-year old woman, who lives on Morgan between 18th and 19th streets, not far from the Fisk plant, and got a routine X-ray for breathing problems.

The doctors asked the woman’s daughter, who took her mother in to be examined, if the mother was a regular smoker.

“She’s never smoked a day in her life,” Torres said. “But her lungs were all black.”

Thursday, September 8, 2011

South-side children have greatest exposure to lead in Chicago, health department data shows


This interactive heat map, compiled using Chicago Department of Public Health data, GIS files, and Google Fusion, shows where Children with the highest rates elevated blood lead levels in Chicago live. Data is from 2010.


Chicago Department of Public Health data shows that children in the poorer, industrialized south of Chicago are more likely to have dangerous levels of lead in their bodies than children in more affluent neighborhoods.

The data, obtained by a FOIA request from the health department, shows the levels of lead the agency found in children 17 and under in the city of Chicago. Most children tested for lead, however, were under 6 years old.

“An EBL or elevated blood lead level, is defined… as the child’s highest venous test with a result of 6 or more micrograms lead (Pb) per deciliter blood,” the health department wrote.

According to the EPA, there is no safe level for lead in the human bloodstream. At 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood, children can develop symptoms such as “lowered intelligence, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity, and antisocial behavior.”

The most recent results are from 2010, but the file contains annual results back to 2005. They were compiled with the help of an epidemiologist in the department.

“Multiple blood lead tests were determined using an algorithm that matches children by name, date of birth and sex, while allowing for common typographical and data entry (eg, reversing first and last name) errors for blood lead tests conducted within a calendar year,” the health department wrote.

In the interactive heat map at the top of the post shows the rate at which children in each of Chicago’s 77 communities reported elevated levels of lead.

The Englewood community has the highest EBL rate, where 9.15 percent of the children who were tested for lead came back with a positive EBL. Neighborhoods in the north end of Chicago had EBL rates between 0.8 percent and 3.31 percent.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Visualization - is there injustice in Pilsen?


This visualization was produced as part of a series about Pilsen, a Chicago neighborhood, and its struggle against pollution. Parts one, two and three of that series have been published on MentalMunition.com.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The People VS the Bottom Line - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 3/4


“Decisions regarding whether or not to proceed with the above projects or other approaches to compliance remain subject to a number of factors, such as market conditions, regulatory and legislative developments, and forecasted commodity prices and capital and operating costs applicable at the time decisions are required or made… Due to existing uncertainties about these factors, Midwest Generation intends to defer final decisions about particular units for the maximum time available. 
- Excerpt from page 92 of Midwest Generation’s 2010 report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, form 10K.

NOTE: The following is the third installment in a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal-fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. It's called "Battle in the Barrio: the Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." Part one, "Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder," is available here. Part two, "Old Problems, New Attention" is available here. A visualization describing Pilsen's struggle with pollution is here.

Part One: Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder
Part Two: Old Problems, New Attention

Part Three: The People VS the Bottom Line

Part Four: Hopelessness and Hope in Pilsen

Visualization - Is there injustice in Pilsen?
Visualization - Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood struggles with pollution
South-side children have greatest exposure to lead in Chicago, health department data shows


In a dimly-lit space in the back of a Pilsen café known for its fruit smoothies, a dozen Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO) activists and organizers huddled over coffees and discussed upcoming plans for an annual community festival, Fiesta del Sol.

A Pilsen tradition for the last 39 years, Fiesta del Sol is an event featuring local art vendors, Mexican food, carnival rides, soccer games, and a chance for local organizations to boost donations and deliver information to the public.

This year, as in years past, Midwest Generation was one of the lead corporate sponsors for the event, and included among a group of sponsors under the banner “Pilsen Neighborhood Community Counts.”

“Let me just say one thing,” Jerry Mead-Lucero said. “There was some discussion about whether we should do something at the Fiesta because of the whole connection with Midwest generation. What I’ve been suggesting is I don’t want to completely piss off Pilsen Neighbors about having a booth there, so I’m not recommending we do something like a direct action in a Fiesta.”

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Visualization - Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood struggles with pollution


The Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago faces unique challenges in terms of environment and health. It retains some of its manufacturing base from when it was an industrial center for Chicago, yet it is primarily residential and now houses a large Latino population. The combination of a dense population and high emissions mean that pollution for the neighborhood is a major concern, as the above visualization demonstrates.

This visualization is part of the series "The Battle in the Barrio: The Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." Part one, "Four sisters, one rare disorder," is here. And part two, "Old problems, new attention," is here.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Old Problems, New Attention - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 2/4

The Fisk Generating Station, Pilsen, Chicago.


“I have a hard time believing if these plants were located on the north side of the city, that they would not have already been cleaned up by now.”
- Rev. Patrick Daymond, Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church, in testimony before the Chicago City Council, during hearings on the Clean Power Ordinance.

NOTE: The following is the second of a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. You can read part one, "Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder," here. More parts of this series, along with visualizations and some interactive elements, will be posted in the coming weeks.

Part One: Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder
Part Two: Old Problems, New Attention

Part Three: The People VS the Bottom Line

Part Four: Hopelessness and Hope in Pilsen

Visualization - Is there injustice in Pilsen?
Visualization - Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood struggles with pollution
South-side children have greatest exposure to lead in Chicago, health department data shows


They come in at the same time every day.

The lumbering train pulls more than 100 of them, each full with black coal rocks, up to the Will County Generation Station, where the contents are unloaded, mixed, and put on several barges and sent up river.

The barges meander up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal, where they dock alongside the Crawford and Fisk coal-fired power plants.

The plants are owned by Midwest Generation, a Delaware limited liability company, solely owned by Edison Mission Midwest Holdings. In turn, Edison Mission Midwest Holdings is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Midwest Generation, EME, LLC. That limited liability company, in turn, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Edison International.
According to Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, Midwest Generation was “formed for the purpose of owning or leasing, making improvements to, and operating and selling the capacity and energy of, the power generation assets it purchased from Commonwealth Edison, which are referred to as the Illinois Plants.”

At the plants, the barges are relieved of their burden and go back down the canal as empty shells. But the coal – that gets turned into electricity. The Fisk and Crawford plants, located in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods on the lower west side of Chicago, respectively, together generate about 858 megawatts of power.

It’s also turned into pollution. The plants released 3,372 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,583 tons of soot, and 5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2008, by the EPA’s count.

On May 24, things did not go as planned at the Crawford and Fisk plants.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Upheavals, earthquakes, and my social media experience on Al Jazeera English

It almost didn’t happen. I was due to be a part of a discussion on Al Jazeera English (AJE), the international news channel, about the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign in Libya.

A half-hour before show time, I receive the following email in my inbox from a producer:

“We had an earthquake and all over the city people are standing outside their buildings,” the producer wrote. “I’m guessing we won’t get back in in time for today’s show. Perhaps we’ll shift our schedule to do it tomorrow, or another day.”

A quick look on the USGS website revealed a 5.9 earthquake had struck Virginia, shaking buildings in D.C. and New York. The Stream, the cutting-edge AJE news program that blends new and traditional media, might miss the historic event in Libya.

First, some background.

Al Jazeera English is an international news channel that is broadcast worldwide from Doha, London and Washington D.C., to an estimated audience of 150 million viewers in 100 countries.

Being headquartered in the East, Al Jazeera was uniquely positioned to report on the Arab Spring uprisings. Indeed, it capitalized on this major news event, and the AJE internet stream gained more than 1.6 million American viewers during the first months of the revolt.

The White House also took notice, and included AJE in its diet of international events coverage. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took notice of the network, and in a briefing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised the quality of reporting on the international channel.

“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” she said.

Perhaps no other AJE program has gained as much momentum during the Arab Spring as the new media experiment The Stream.

Broadcast daily from Monday through Thursday from the Washington D.C. studio, the Stream hosts a panel of two to three guests who have some kind of stake in a major news event. But that’s where the similarities between this and other current events programs end.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

U of I talks with prominent social media researchers now online


It’s been a year since the University of Illinois hosted the “Year of Social Media,” a lecture series that hosted people at the forefront of the social media revolution.

During the series, Fernanda B. ViĂ©gas from Google spoke about bringing powerful, yet simple to operate, computer visualization programs to the masses. An Oxford professor postulated whether the internet is really a “fifth estate,” or if cyber utopianism is a “net delusion.” And the Onion web editor talked about how a social media conversation doesn’t always yield positive results.

“The Onion is very much not interested in having a conversation with its community of viewers and listeners in social media,” the Onion’s Baratunde Thurston said during his lecture, before playing an Onion sketch of a television news anchor being berated by audience members through social media.

Videos of all the talks are now available on the event’s website. The seven lecture videos total more than ten hours of footage.

“We have invited prominent researchers who study social media, leading figures from the social media industry, and people who embody social media success stories,” the YISM website reads.

The program was organized by Karrie Karahalios, a computer science professor and graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and Christian Sandvig, an Associate Professor of Communication, Media & Cinema Studies, Library & Information Science. Sandvig is also a Research Associate Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Abstracts of the speakers, obtained from the YISM website, are listed after the break. For the full videos, please visit https://www.informatics.uiuc.edu/display/infospeak/Home.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder - BATTLE IN THE BARRIO part 1/4


From left: Lizette, Martha and Gloria Herrera, outside their family home in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. After a lifetime of living near the Fisk coal-powered plant, Martha and Gloria have developed lupus. Martha’s daughter, Lizette, also is showing early signs of the disease.

NOTE: The following is the first of a series of four stories about the environmental and health impact of coal fired power plants on densely-populated, low income Chicago communities. It's called "Battle in the Barrio: the Struggle in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood Against Pollution." More parts of this series, along with visualizations and some interactive elements, will be posted in the coming weeks. The series is part of a journalistic research project that culminated in a master's project for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Part One: Four Sisters, One Rare Disorder
Part Two: Old Problems, New Attention
Part Three: The People VS the Bottom Line
Part Four: Hopelessness and Hope in Pilsen
Visualization - Is there injustice in Pilsen?
Visualization - Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood struggles with pollution
South-side children have greatest exposure to lead in Chicago, health department data shows


 
For most of their lives, two of the four Herrera sisters -- Gloria and Martha -- thought that the hardest part of living in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago was staying safe from crime.

On a mid-July morning, as a fast-moving thunderstorm poured cool rain over the neighborhood and provided relief from the most oppressive heat wave in years, the two sisters reflected on some close calls.

“We were never allowed to hang out on the sidewalk,” Gloria, who is now 43, remembered of her childhood in Pilsen.

Outside, thunderclaps ricocheted off of the old brick houses, off the pastel-painted facade of restaurants with names like Nuevo Leon, La Casa Del Pueblo and La Cebollita, off murals of Che Guevara, Jesus and Mexican cowboys.

The day before, the National Weather Service measured a high temperature of 99 degrees from the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, with 78 percent humidity. The temperature, measured by the television station the sisters had muted while they talked, fell to 71 degrees. The raindrops splashed on the porch they had spent their summers on as children.

When Gloria wanted to play with neighborhood friends, they would have to get permission from their parents to come over – and then if they did get permission, her friends could only sit with Gloria on the porch. “Two houses down, there were gangbangers in that house. And there were gangbangers across the street on the corner house.”

“We had, like, four different gangs all around us,” said Martha, 54.

The streets belonged to the gangs. There was, however, something that belonged only to the children in the neighborhood.

“That’s why we played soccer,” she said. “Because it was ours, you know.”

The nearby playground of Benito Juarez High School provided a level of safety from the industrial streets of Pilsen, and a place where children could be themselves. Gloria and Martha still had to keep on their toes on the nine-block journey between their home on Carpenter Street and the high school.

“We would be coming back from soccer practice at five in the afternoon, or seven in the evening, and the gangs would be shooting at each other, and we had to crouch down and run home for two blocks. We would be hiding between cars just to get home safely,” Gloria said.

And even at home, the threat sometimes lingered.

“We would be sitting here watching TV, and you would hear gunshots,” she said. “We would throw ourselves on the floor.”

“That’s the life we learned to live. And our kids, also, same thing.”

Gang violence is an ever-present part of life in Pilsen, a sooty, post-industrial barrio on Chicago’s lower west side. But just in the last several years, a very real threat has trumped the Herrera’s safety concerns about gang violence. Unlike a stray bullet from a gang-banger’s gun, it could not be dodged by hiding behind cars.

Gloria remembered the exact day it started: Feb. 7, 2001.

“I remember, because it was very traumatic for me,” Gloria said.

She was attending a banquet for La CLASA, the Chicago Latin American Soccer Association, when she couldn’t take a full breath. “I just couldn’t breathe,” Gloria said, “So I was rushed to the emergency room.”

Gloria was diagnosed and treated for pneumonia and sent home. On July 7, she suffered a heart attack at work. A co-worker took her to the University of Illinois Medical Center, where hospital staff administered a battery of tests and determined that Gloria’s liver and kidneys were shutting down. Doctors gave her three days to live.

“It was our 9/11,” Martha said.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Google scholarship signals growth in data journalism field


Google announced Monday that it would give $20,000 to journalism students who can mash-up computer science and enterprise reporting.

The scholarship program is a joint venture between the Associated Press (AP) and Google, and will be administered by the Online News Association (ONA).

“The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program will provide $20,000 scholarships for the 2012-13 academic year to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media,” Google and the AP wrote in a press release. “The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism.”

On the official Google blog, ONA executive director Jane McDonnell said the goal of the scholarship was “to shine a light on the hidden treasures in schools across the country—the digital-minded journalists who will be the future of our industry.”

More information is available at http://ap-google.onlinenewsassociation.org/

The AP-Google scholarship is one of the latest initiatives to bolster the ranks of journalists with data specialists who can use computer skills to sort, filter and describe important trends hiding in a sea of public data. Those trends can be a springboard to launch investigations into a wide variety of issues, including poverty, health, crime and social justice.

The need for those types of computer and analytical skills is only increasing as governments begin to publish on the internet troves of documents that were previously difficult to access.

Brant Houston, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation chair for enterprise and investigative reporting at the University of Illinois, wrote in the summer 2010 Nieman Reports that data journalists could help improve the nation’s investigative reporting strength.

 “Digital media’s capabilities might provide ways to hold public agencies accountable while expanding journalists’ role as community watchdogs,” he wrote.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Breaking down the downgrade: distilling the message with visualizations and context.

Markets, both domestic and abroad, spent no time to react on the news that Standard & Poor’s, one of the three major companies that rate the solvency of nations, had downgraded the United States credit rating from AAA to AA+.

S&P released its report on the downgrade on Friday, Aug. 6, after American markets were closed. Overseas markets were the first to move, with Japan’s Nikkei index dropping 2.2 percent. A sell-off sent China’s mainland Shanghai market down 2.2 percent. The country’s Hang Seng index flirted with a 7 percent drop before settling down 4.5 percent for the day.

When it came time for America’s markets to open the following Monday, the Dow lost several hundred points in the first hour of trading, and ended down 512 points 4.3 percent. It was the biggest one-day drop since Dec. 1, 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported. It’s among the top 10 biggest one-day DIJA declines ever, the Journal wrote. Crude oil prices also fell amidst concerns about lower demand.

But what does the S&P report actually say? How can we distill and best represent it? The following word cloud identifies dominant words in the document, with the size of a word relating to its presence in the document.




Friday, August 5, 2011

Visualization shows expansion, peak and fall of the American newspaper

A new visualization from Stanford University charts the expansion of printing presses as early settlers headed west, as well as the peak and decline of the American newspaper.

It’s also highly interactive, letting users scroll back and forth through the American history of newspapers, pausing for textual markers at historically significant times. Users also get a breakdown of the publications serving a particular town, and can filter papers by the language they were published in or by publication frequency.



This was a major undertaking from the Rural West Initiative of Stanford University, which involved tapping into a directory of some 140,000 American newspapers at the Library of Congress.

“It would be fairer to call this a ‘database’ visualization than an omniscient creator’s-eye view of the growth of American newspapers,” the Rural West Initiative writes on an introduction to the visualization. “There are known (and surely unknown) omissions from this list, as well as duplicate entries, and entries that are similar and can appear duplicative.”

The visualization accompanies a report by the Initiative which indicates that while metro journalism has been on the decline for decades, rural journalism is still alive and thriving, although the job makes for “a lean living” for rural journalists and most papers are “an advertiser or two away from red ink.” Many reporters and some editors are fresh out of J-school.

Geoff McGhee, the Bill Lane Center creative director, and Judy Muller, a contributing editor at the Rural West Initiative, will both be on the Salt Lake City NPR station KUER to discuss the report August 8, at 10 a.m. pacific time (12 p.m. central, 1 p.m. eastern). It will also be simulcast on the SiriusXM Public radio channel.

Listeners can call the station at (801) 585-WEST or submit questions at radiowest@kuer.org. The station website has a live stream and will archive the show as a podcast.

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University lab tweeted of the interactive map, “How cool (or sad?) is this?” That’s because the dots peak at about 1920, and decline to the number we see today. Most news begins life in a newspaper news room, according to a 2009 Pew study on the Baltimore news ecosystem.

“Fully eight out of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published information,” Pew wrote. “Indeed the expanding universe of new media, including blogs, Twitter and local websites—at least in Baltimore—played only a limited role: mainly an alert system and a way to disseminate stories from other places.”

The Initiative’s report seems to support Pew’s conclusions.

For some original reporting about the St. Louis newspaper market, including several visuals about the rise and fall of newspapers in the city, along with a report about a nonprofit newsroom trying to buck the trend, read “Funding Challenges, Long-term Aspirations of a Nonprofit Newsroom.”

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Former Ill. Gov. Edgar on Politicians Molding the Media, Blagojevich Retrial

Former Ill. Gov. Jim Edgar speaks to graduate journalism students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on May 4 about the relationship between politicians and the press, and about the odds that former governor Rod Blagojevich will be found guilty in his corruption retrial.

For those who like to play “what if,” imagine this scenario.

Jim Edgar, the Republican Illinois governor from 1991 to 1999, leaves office with a high approval rating. He’s generally well-respected by the media and the voting public. In 2003, U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald announces he’s not going to run again, which inspires President George Bush to call Edgar and ask him to run for the seat.

Edgar says yes. Despite running in a Blue state, because of his generally positive reputation as governor and center-leaning Republican, he wins the race in a landslide and becomes the next Illinois senator.

That’s not what happened. While Edgar left office with a 60 percent approval rating, and was asked by President Bush to go for the senate seat, Edgar declined.

Instead, Alan Keyes ran against Barack Obama. Keyes had extremely little credibility in Illinois, especially in Chicago, where he had adopted legal residence only just before the election. The race was no contest for Obama, who easily won with 70 percent of the vote. But being the presidential catapult the Illinois senate seat turned out to be, it’s obvious how different American politics could have been if Edgar decided to run.

“I remember a couple of times they tried to get me to run for the senate, and I decided against doing it, and some of the media guys from Chicago said ‘You’re right, we’re a lot nastier than we used to be,’” Edgar said to the small class of University of Illinois graduate journalism students in early May.

He’s now a distinguished fellow of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA) at the U of I. The position affords him the opportunity to talk to journalism students about the power of media from a very different perspective – a politician dependent on the media to carry a message to the public.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

A Radical New Mission for Drones: Helping Journalists find Truth



Drones are mostly associated with the ongoing war in Afghanistan and Pakistan – where they continue to shoot missiles and drop bombs on the insurgency. Between 1,492 and 2,378 died from drone attacks in Pakistan between 2004 and May 24, 2011, according to theNew America Foundation, and the number of drone attacks have more than doubled under the Obama administration.

The drones present serious concerns for the Pakistanis about their own safety and sovereignty, and have sparked protests at the UK parliament.

The military-industrial complex and global politics have greatly advanced both the application and development of military drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as they’re called in military parlance. A large, jet-powered stealth drone played a majorrole in tracking down Osama bin Laden. Now there’s entire military expos dedicated solely to UAVs.

But armed conflict and espionage are not a drone’s raison d'ĂȘtre. Strictly speaking, a drone is simply an unmanned vehicle that guided remotely, or is self-guiding. And just as the advancement of drone technology has increased the military’s capabilities, those advancements have trickled down to the private commercial sector.

With a little know-how, a resourceful civilian – or journalist -- can order “off-the-shelf” components and make and fly a drone.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Funding Challenges, Long-term Aspirations of a Nonprofit Newsroom

Shot of the newly-renovated KETC newsroom in St. Louis, Missouri. The building houses the St. Louis public television broadcaster, as well as the nonprofit online news organization the St. Louis Beacon. Photo from MagneticNorth.


You can’t mention a “model” for funding journalism without a can of mace these days. Mention the word, and you instantly become fodder for journalists, media tycoons, college professors, bloggers, SEO con artists and pretty much anyone with enough fingers to tweet.


Lately, the targets have been the newly-erected paywall at the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-exclusive app, The Daily. With the former, some suspect potential customers will be baffled and irked. With the latter, critics say Apple’s exorbitant fees and News Corp's cumbersome implementation may ultimately doom the enterprise. Other critics say both will fail long-term because they are dependent on closed, vertically-integrated systems that create artificial scarcity that simply does not exist in the rest of the digital world; and it only takes a short hop over the paywall or app store to find freer, greener pastures.

But before the Times and the Daily were whipping boys, nonprofit newsrooms were a popular whipping boy. MinnPost, the Voice of San Diego and ProPublica were the first of these newsrooms to garner nationwide attention. Some praised these operations for filling an enormous gap of coverage that commercial media left open, while others questioned whether it was wise to rely on handouts from a handful of wealthy donors to sustain journalism.

While the long-term prospects of those newsrooms remain to be seen, but they are still alive, vibrant, and producing journalism.

One of the lesser-known nonprofit newsrooms is the St. Louis Beacon. I recently had the opportunity to interview several people from that online news organization, including its founder.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Nebraska Has The Most Fire-Prone Nuclear Plant in the U.S.

While the international community focuses on Japan and its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the safety of which was seriously compromised following a massive earthquake, the United States has a renewed interest in the safety of nuclear power at home.

A probe into the safety of US nuclear plants, using data from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and data visualization software, suggests that America's plants are relatively safe overall, but that some power plants are more prone to incidents than others.