"Intersections of Journalism with Computer Science and Data”
Journalists have slowly embraced data and computer-assisted reporting and now it is an integral part of the profession. But this change has also advanced the depth of collaboration between journalists and computer scientists – and other disciplines – on data analysis and data presentation and has led to increasingly sophisticated reporting of the news. This session will be an overview of evolution of this movement, of how the collaborations are working and of some of the challenges that have been overcome.
The speaker: Brant Houston is a Professor and Knight Chair of Investigative Reporting in the College of Media at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He author of four editions of the textbook Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide and co-author of of the fourth and fifth editions of the Investigative Reporter’s Handbook. Houston has taught investigative and computer-assisted reporting in more than 20 countries and he is co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. He also is Chair of the Board of Directors for the Investigative News Network, which he helped launch in 2009.
In addition to his teaching, he oversees an award-winning online newsroom in the Journalism Department at Illinois and is working on projects on new business models for journalism and on new technologies for news-gathering with colleagues in Informatics and at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.
Houston became the Knight chair after serving for more than a decade as the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 5,000-member organization, and as a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining IRE, he was an award-winning investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 17 years.
"Intersections of Journalism with Computer Science and Data” When: 3-4:30 p.m. Thursday, Apr. 30th; A reception starts 2:30 p.m. through 3 p.m. Where: Oak Room in Memorial Union
This talk is supported by the LAS Signature Research Initiative for the collaboration among Greenlee School, Computer Science and Political Science, as part of the effort to build a research community in computational communication and journalism and political informatics.