Computational Journalism by Jonathan Stray.
From the webpage:
Maybe it’s not obvious that computer science and journalism go together, but they do!
Computational journalism combines classic journalistic values of storytelling and public accountability with techniques from computer science, statistics, the social sciences, and the digital humanities.
This course, given at the University of Hong Kong during January-February 2013, is an advanced look at how techniques from visualization, natural language processing, social network analysis, statistics, and cryptography apply to four different areas of journalism: finding stories through data mining, communicating what you’ve learned, filtering an overwhelming volume of information, and tracking the spread of information and effects.
The course assumes knowledge of computer science, including standard algorithms and linear algebra. The assignments are in Python and require programming experience. But this introductory video, which explains the topics covered, is for everyone.
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For more, see the syllabus, or jump directly to a lecture:
- Basics. Feature vectors, clustering, projections.
- Text analysis. Tokenization, TF-IDF, topic modeling.
- Algorithmic filters. Information overload. Newsblaster and Google News.
- Hybrid filters. Social networks as filters. Collaborative Filtering.
- Social network analysis. Using it in journalism. Centrality algorithms.
- Knowledge representation. Structured data. Linked open data. General Q&A.
- Drawing conclusions. Randomness. Competing hypotheses. Causation.
- Security, surveillance, and privacy. Cryptography. Threat modeling.
CS knowledge and programming experience still required.
Interfaces will lessen that need over time but that knowledge/experience will help you question when interfaces have given odd results.
I would settle for journalists who question reports, like the Mandiant advertisement on cybersecurity last week. (Crowdsourcing Cybersecurity: A Proposal (Part 1))
Even the talking heads on the PBS Sunday morning news treated it as serious content. It was poorly written/researched ad copy, nothing more.
Of course, you would have to read the first couple of pages to discover that, not just skim the press release.
I first saw this at Christophe Lalanne’s A bag of tweets / February 2013.