Fred Thys stood on stage and played an audio clip. It was a recording of a man that had been college roommates with a soldier recently killed in active duty. The crowd of over 150 people who had gathered there to listen fell silent. The friend’s portrayal of the fallen veteran wasn’t consistent with what
CategoryProject Updates
Documenting COVID-19 project and MuckRock join together to expand public records journalism with partner newsrooms
The Documenting COVID-19 project, started in April 2020 at Columbia and Stanford’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation, will work hand-in-hand with MuckRock to file public records requests and collaborate on accountability journalism with partnering newsrooms. Launched in April 2020 by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the Documenting COVID-19 project has filed thousands of public
Big Local News project leads to front page stories at EdSource and the New York Times
The Big Local News project, in partnership with OpenNews, The New York Times, EdSource, the Colorado News Collaborative, and Tom Dee from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, recently shared the fruits of their labor — the collection and analysis of school enrollment loss at the school and grade level due to Covid-19. Major
Notes from NYCML and CHANEL’s Synthetic Media Challenge
Over the Spring semester, I participated in the NYC Media Lab’s Synthetic Media challenge, in collaboration with CHANEL. This challenge brought together teams of faculty and students from a variety of schools in New York to explore how new technologies such as GANs can reimagine the future of storytelling, and unlock new ways to develop,
2020-21 Magic Grant Profile: Self-Moderating Online Focus Groups and Deliberation
Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Self-Moderating Online Focus Groups and Deliberation is building a tool for better online deliberation. Through an automated moderator that provides equitable, respectful, and constructive conversation the team behind this grant aims to support deliberative democracy, developing a scalable online platform that addresses current challenges such a small group who dominates the
2020-21 Magic Grant Profile: Documenting COVID-19
Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Documenting COVID-19 began as a 2019-2020 Magic Grant that shifted its focus to reporting on how local governments were responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. The team has continued its work, issuing targeted Freedom of Information Act requests to build a nationwide repository of Covid-19 related emails between city, county, and state
2020-21 Magic Grant Profile: Wolf Pack
Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Wolf Pack examines for the first time how media coverage of criminal justice helped turn the United States into the most incarcerated country in the world. In collaboration with data scientists at both Stanford and Columbia, the team is preparing a database of national and local media coverage of criminal justice
2020-21 Magic Grant Profile: Leitmotif
Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Leitmotif: Location-Driven Audio Storytelling uses geolocation to deliver dynamic audio storytelling and connect users to stories of people, places, and things they walk by. The team is creating software to enable the generation of location-specific audio stories and a paired smartphone application to allow users to consume audio content. Through this
2020-21 Magic Grant Profile: Improving Remote Learning via Hierarchical Decomposition of Instructional Videos
Improving Remote Learning via Hierarchical Decomposition of Instructional Videos – one of our 2020-21 Magic Grants – aims to facilitate the creation of instructional videos with logical navigation. To do this, the team is using algorithms that automatically learn shared action steps from videos across different tasks. With this knowledge, the team is finding a