Homework for Thursday, September 17
This work is for Thursday’s class.
Data Journalism and Media
We end the week by considering how we now get much of our information. Data visualizations are commonplace in news stories, but the crisis of journalism and the waning of traditional and local news raise difficult questions about accuracy, trust, censorship, and whose stories receive attention.
1. Data-Driven Visual Stories
- Can an AI Make a Data-Driven, Visual Story?, The Pudding, July 2024.
2. Journalism, Propaganda, and Surveillance
- Noam Chomsky on Propaganda (30:00), The Big Idea, BBC, February 1996.
- Snowden Interview: Why the Media Isn’t Doing Its Job, Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism Review, May 2016.
- Private Israeli Spyware Used to Hack Cellphones of Journalists and Activists, The Washington Post, July 2021.
As you read the Snowden interview, look up unfamiliar people and events. We will discuss Snowden’s revelations about government surveillance in a future week. For Thursday, focus on his arguments about what journalists do and do not cover, and why. Follow the links concerning James Rosen, the Associated Press, and drone reporting. Consider whether journalism has a right or duty to report this information and why so few outlets do so.
3. Find an Example
Bring to class one example of a world event that received little coverage in U.S. news. Consider looking at non-U.S. news sources or podcasts hosted outside the United States.
4. DataCamp: Understanding Data Visualization
Complete Understanding Data Visualization:
- Chapter 3: The Color and the Shape
- Chapter 4: 99 Problems but a Plot Ain’t One of Them
Do not get mired in granular details. Focus on developing an intuitive sense of good practices and learning how to interpret different kinds of visualizations. If you need more Tableau practice, return to the earlier homework video and try recreating the graphs, or choose a Tableau sample dataset and experiment with it.
5. Questions and Terms to Know
- What factors influence our access to good information?
- Why do Chomsky and Snowden argue that journalism does not always adequately inform the public?
- How has the internet changed journalism and access to information?
- Should governments have the right to censor or monitor journalists? Is any news legitimately off-limits?
- How do color, shape, and choice of chart influence the conclusions viewers draw from a visualization?
Key distinctions
- Journalism vs. propaganda: What separates an effort to inform the public from an effort to shape opinion or behavior? Can journalism also function as propaganda?
- Omission vs. censorship: How is a story that receives little attention different from one that is deliberately suppressed? Who makes those decisions?
- Government surveillance vs. private or corporate surveillance: How do the actors, purposes, powers, and forms of accountability differ?
- Accurate information vs. adequate context: Can individual facts or visualizations be technically accurate while still creating a misleading impression?
- Decorative color vs. color as information: When does color merely affect appearance, and when does it encode a category, value, or relationship that readers need to interpret?
Be prepared to explain each distinction in your own words, recognize it in an example, and use it to compare the assigned materials.
Again: this is homework for Thursday, September 17.