Brown Institute Converges for Base Camp at Stanford

The Brown Institute was founded on the promise that by bringing together students from our two campuses, Stanford and Columbia, we might be able to change the world, but we’d certainly be able to enrich their lives. This past weekend, we did just that, inviting 24 students to particpate in our third annual Base Camp held at Stanford.

We spent the weekend, from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, developing project frameworks to enrich the discussions happening in comments sections, characterize journalists’ use of anonymous sources across different publications, craft new expressions of the “American Dream,” and create playful ways to break online ad tracking.

The event was designed and emceed by Lydia Chilton, our Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford for 2016/2017, making the jump from being a previous Base Camper to Head Councilor.

Part of what makes Base Camp so meaningful to us at The Brown Institute is that it is such a distilled expression of what we aspire to do: literally bringing together students of Journalism, Engineering, and related fields from Columbia and Stanford, and getting them to appreciate and collaborate with one another. In just three days, these students meet each other, most for the first time, and by the end they’ve seen through the planning of several radically diverse projects that push technology and story forward in some way.

It also serves as a chance to bring new collaborators into the Brown Institute family, creating project ideas and potential collaborators across both universities for our upcoming fifth annual Magic Grants. If spending a few months, or a year working on that intersection of story and technology, or using technology to push journalism forward sounds like your idea of a good time, consider putting in an application.

See more photos from the event by our Stanford visiting professor Greg Niemeyer and 360gifs by Rosalie Yu.