AuthorMark Hansen

The Institute at Columbia has two open positions — one for a creative technologist and one for a database aficionado. The first person will conduct original “creative research” that expands on traditional forms of journalism and storytelling. They should work easily with teams of journalists, other members of the Brown Institute, and the larger creative

NewsCounts, a Knight Foundation funded project, is seeking two Research Scholars to help report on the 2020 U.S. Census and its role in American democracy — from privacy in the decennial count, to its impacts on funding across the country, to how journalists find and tell stories in the numbers. NewsCounts was just featured on

NOAH is a mapping application created by Disha Shetty, Maya Miller, Pankhuri Kumar and Ravie Lakshmanan, alumni of Columbia Journalism School, and Pietro Ceccato of SPACEBEL. It was made possible by a grant from the Brown Institute. This is a short report on NOAH’s development, and how can be used to uncover underreported stories on

By Alex Calderwood. Justin Hicks’ deep voice rolls through the microphone, sending blue light across the dark chamber like a waveform, illuminating on the table in front of me a half eaten piece of corn-on-the-cob and the faces of people who until a few minutes ago were strangers. The light reverbs-out with his voice, hinting

“The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.”  Hamming, 1962. Fernando Perez, one of the creators of the Jupyter Notebook, began his talk at the Brown Institute Thursday with this quote from Richard Hamming’s book on algorithms. Fernando, or at least Jupyter, will be familiar to students in the Journalism School who have taken any

Thursday, May 9, Fernando Perez, a co-founder of Project Jupyter, will be the last speaker in our Distinguished Lecture Series in Computational Innovation. His team is responsible for the Jupyter notebook that we use throughout the Journalism School — from the Lede, to the Data MS, to the Dual Degree.  It even finds its way

By Alex Calderwood. In 2008, Noya Kohavi found herself employed as a reporter for the Israeli fashion magazine Signon. She got the job “by accident,” after signing on to write profiles for them. “It was really fun, but I didn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. When Kohavi was assigned a story — Spring trends

By Alex Calderwood. From algorithms that design flight paths for drones to record videos of a scene, to a 360° camera technology that helps a photographer find the best placement for their camera and lights, Brown has long supported work that makes complex storytelling tools easier to use. Among the 2018-19 Magic Grants are a