Data Science + Journalism @ KDD 2017
August 14, 2017 - Halifax, Canada
Introduction
This is an exciting time for journalism. The rise of online media and computational journalism proposes new opportunities for investigation, presentation and distribution of news. One opportunity is collaborative data science-facilitated journalism: for the Panama Papers project, 2.6 Terabyte of offshore documents were analysed; the resulting stories caused global attention and investigations in 79 countries, and led to the resignation of several heads of state. Other opportunities arise from new formats such as Virtual Reality, Drone and Robot Journalism which offer completely new forms of storytelling. In addition to new opportunities, there are challenges that are proving critical in 2017. The role of social media on the distribution of information is controversial. Fake news and filter bubbles are blamed for political, social and economic unrest, and they have caused a crisis in trust in the news industry. And traditional media outlets still struggle to adjust their business models.
Data-driven journalism promises to bring a more objective perspective on reported issues. Methods of data science are applied to find empirically sound stories from the vast amounts of data that are by now collected from every aspect of our lives. Data scientists are experts on empirical evaluation, data investigation, and visualization, methods that can help shed light on many topics of public interest. On the other hand, journalists are typically great storytellers and talented communicators, skills that are valued in data science. Thus, data scientists and journalists can profit a lot from each other’s skills and talents.
This is why we want to bridge the gap between these two communities and bring them closer together at the workshop for Data Science + Journalism (DS+J). We believe the current media situation provides us with an opportunity for attempts at synthesis, forming a common core of problems and ideas, and cross-pollinating across subareas.
We seek to invite researchers in all subfields of Data Mining and Data-driven Journalism to attend the workshop and to explore together how to reach the goals imagined. We hope you will join us in beautiful Halifax, Canada at the upcoming KDD Data Science + Journalism Workshop!