Hello from Berlin

Excited to share that I’ve arrived in Berlin and will be spending this fall visiting at the UCLab at the University of Potsdam. Information and visualization designer + researcher Francesca Morini is graciously hosting my stay. I hope to think harder about my work on data experiences for local news outlets as both a new avenue for existing data journalism stories and as a means to rebuild trust. I’ll be teaching an associated short course for students here. Beyond that I will be learning, writing, speaking, meeting folks, and traveling. Say hello if you’re nearby 👋🏽.

Thanks to a rich and friendly network here I’ve already got a few speaking events lined up to help me think through new ideas in community with others.

SciCAR: Training Data Journalists in the Age of AI (Sept 18)
I’m honored to be invited to deliver a keynote talk at SciCAR, the annual German gathering of journalists, developers, and researchers. For a decade they’ve been bringing a network together and I’m excited to learn from all the sessions there. My talk will share a few guiding principles, grounded in real examples, about how we can think about training ourselves and new data journalists during this era of AI growth.

Visualizing Climate: Provoking Climate Action with Data-Inspired Body Percussion (Nov 4-6)
I’ll be back in Bologna for the already-sold-out Visualizing Climate event. I’m going out on a limb again and proposed an experimental body-percussion workshop, building on the Data Drums performance prototype from last year. Early feedback was that there’s something unique here about feeling the CO2 impacts on your body, so this time we’ll be creating rhythms with and on our bodies based on global climate emissions data.

Feminist Tech Evening: Care and Data, in the age of AI (Oct 20)
I was excited to reconnect with the wonderful author and researcher Zara Rahman. She now co-directs SUPERRR Lab, and generously offered to host me for one of their Berlin discussion events. We’ll be chatting about ideas that are growing from my Community Data book, related to care in community around data. Keep an eye on my socials for location and registration info.

After a long delay, the work I led with Meg Heckman and Liz Hadjis has finally been published in the News Research Journal. We dug into how AI could help automate a content audit for small newsrooms. I’m excited to have this older work out in the world in a more formal way. The lessons I learned from the project continue to inform my “AI-last” approach to computational journalism research; I only lean on it once I’ve exhausted any other more traditional machine-learning means for solving the problem at hand.