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Final Projects

By Irfan Essa | March 5, 2008

Computational Journalism Final Projects

Out: March 6, 2008

Deadlines:

Details:

Final projects should be composed of both analytic and constructive components; analyze a particular issue and then construct a prototype in response to that. The goal is to build some form of new media artifact or prototype which considers some of the issues that we have been talking about this semester (e.g. journalism practice, automation of reporting, news gathering, sense-making, contextualization, aggregation, personalization, information quality and bias etc.).

Projects should be in groups of three, though depending on the scope of your project you may also have four people in the group (please talk to Irfan or Nick). Post your group and project idea on the swiki as soon as you get it sorted out. Evaluation of the project will be based on an in-class presentation on April 22, a short write-up of the project, and of course the quality and effectiveness of the prototype that you build.

Here are some high level ideas for projects. This is just a small subset of what could be done, so if you have a more creative idea then go for it!

  1. Extend and build upon the “Information Diffusion in Blogosphere” assignment and implement a general purpose News+Blog interface to the varied responses to news articles in the blogosphere. This would also include incorporating text sentiment analysis algorithms or APIs and UI design. What should a blog dashboard look like for an individual story?
  2. Quote De-contextualization Detector: Using the clustered output of a news aggregator such as Google news, collect all of the quotes from those stories and detect if some of them have been shortened or changes. Then allow people online to rate detected altered quotes depending on whether the meaning of the quote is affected in some significant way.
  3. Image Forensics Browser Plugin. There’s been a lot of recent work in the area of image forensics (trying to detect if an image has been altered). See Hany Farid’s page at Dartmouth for more details: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/tampering.html . The project is to take one (or more of these image processing algorithms) and integrate it into a browser plugin (e.g. A Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox), so that as someone is surfing a news site, then get feedback on the veracity of the images on the page.
  4. Develop a visualization of news information as an interface to either 1) support research and sense-making by a journalist or 2) facilitate news understanding by a consumer or both. You could pick a particular medium of news information such a broadcast/video, print, radio/podcasts, blogs etc. and focus your visualization around the constraints of that medium. You might consider visualizations over time, space or some hybrid form. Think about what visuals would be useful for understanding and answering questions about the data.
  5. Computational Photo Journalism: Taking a textual news story as input automatically or semi-automatically produce a photo essay of that news story using photos taken from news sources or other online photo sources. As an example see NewsInPictures (http://newsinpictures.deakondesign.com/).
  6. Think about how to re-mediate traditional editorial cartoons from newspapers for an interactive platform and then build an online system for either authoring or interacting with these pictorial editorials.
  7. Automatically hyper-mediate multimedia news information for instance by automatically creating links in a textual news story to the audio (or video) portion of the actual interview.
  8. Build an authoring tool of some form to facilitate an element of journalistic practice (e.g. verification of information, contextualization, relevancy, bias managment etc.). In particular you might consider how to build a tool that would make doing good journalism much easier for a citizen journalist. For instance, a tool to easily cut together video interview material into a compelling interview (or group of interviews).
  9. News games (See http://www.newsgaming.com/ for an idea of what this means). Build a newsgame (or several smaller ones) that allow people to explore a complex issue through simulation and gaming. Think about how you might build a news game authoring tool for editorial journalists. Or would it be possible to take a written story and transmediate it into a game automatically.
  10. Collaborative Technologies: 2.0 is all the rage these days. Think about how to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to facilitate journalistic goals. For example: what about a collaborative bias detection system? Or a collaborative image / video debunker?

Feel free to suggest other ideas for the class to consider below.

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