This summer – The Brown Institute in Columbia College!

Brown Institute fellow Charles Berret and other members of our staff collaborated on a new class being offered by Columbia College. The six-week summer course is focused on using data, code and algorithms to open new lines of journalistic inquiry and new ways of telling stories about the world around us. The class will explore the role of journalists as storytellers for the public, explaining that over time, technology has changed how and what stories are told. In parallel, the course builds on the traditional journalistic techniques for asking questions about how society functions, and introduces the new technical tools of computation. This course is intended to help students understand the world in new ways and question the very tools and frameworks that they will learn during the semester. The classes will enable students to recognize what phenomena in the world can be translated into data and what aspects of the world are open to computation. Students are expected to produce works of journalism. They will explore the history of the profession and the basics of reporting, but will continually return to aspects of computation as a means of exploring the world and how it functions. Our hope is that this class, through its connection to journalism, will offer a new kind of critical thinking around technology. Students are required to bring their own laptop to all sessions. Read about the class!