You are here: Home / Archives for Research

Spring semester, 2015 Research opportunities for TCNJ Journalism, Media and Public Health Students

by Leave a Comment

What’s this all about?

We've been telling you in every class - you've got to learn how to collaborate and work in teams. You've got to get comfortable with technology. You've got to understand social media strategy. You've got to understand the business side of the news business. This is an opportunity to do that, working in one of two small teams with a professor. One team will write a business plan for a new media venture, drawing upon the experience gained from two prior media ventures launched by the program, and input from experts. The second team will complete work on the SOAP project - an environmental information system developed over the last several years through a collaboration between computer science students, journalism and Interactive Multimedia Students, and Trenton Habitat for Humanity.

JPW 391: SOAP (Students Organized Against Pollution)

The goal of the SOAP project is to create a software system that helps residents, developers and policymakers in Trenton, New Jersey easily access information about the environmental condition of a particular piece of property. This includes whether there are pollutants, whether there have been enforcement actions or remediation efforts, the potential health effects of those pollutants and additional sources of help and information. Substantial progress has been made in the development of the system, and a prototype should be near completion by the end of 2014. Students working on this project would collaborate with computer science students working under the direction of Dr. Monisha Pulimood to augment content for the system, improve its esthetics and usability, and build a social media strategy, among other projects. Students will complete a multimedia reporting project, a mapping project, and learn to write simple scripts to scrape public data from websites.

This project will be useful to students pursuing study in public health, health communication, and the environmental studies concentration. Although students who previously took Topics: Health and Environmental Reporting are encouraged to enroll, prior experience with that class is not required.

Although the weekly meeting time for this project will be flexible. Students must be available for for approximately six joint class meetings with Prof. Pulimood's students, occurring at Tuesdays and Fridays at 12:30.

Students enrolling in the independent research course need to fill out an independent study enrollment form that must be signed by Prof. Pearson and either Dr. Jean Graham or Dr. Glenn Steinberg. The independent study enrollment form is available in the English department office, Bliss 129.

JPW 393*: Reinventing unbound

In the journalism/professional writing curriculum, the practicum course is intended to allow students to pursue a substantial project related to the management of a campus publication. For Spring, 2015, we are launching a group practicum project that

Unbound was an experiment in online journalism that originated in Kim Pearson's magazine writing class and Elizabeth Mackie's graphic design class in the spring, 1996 semester. It ran continuously from then until the end of 2008. It was based, in part, on lessons learned from an experiment in launching a print magazine, College Money, which published four issues between 1991 and 1994. In the summer of 2006, students working under the direction of Dr. Monisha Pulimood created a content management system for unbound, running on a Postgres SQL database. Due to technical limitations of the system, we were unable to implement many interactive features that had become commonplace for online publications, and the project seemed to reach a dead end.

Now, however, we have an opportunity to start fresh. Students in the Fall, 2014 Writing for Interactive Multimedia class are reconceptualizing unbound as a dynamic platform for millenials seeking knowledge and resources that will give them a leg up in pursuing media-related careers. We will use their ideas, and consultations with industry experts, as a starting point for developing a formal business plan that will include:

1. A competitive analysis
2. Market research
3. A review of potential business models
4. Prototype development
5. A preliminary financial statement

Students enrolling in the practicum need to fill out an independent study enrollment form that must be signed by Prof. Pearson and either Dr. Jean Graham or Dr. Glenn Steinberg. The independent study enrollment form is available in the English department office, Bliss 129.
*An earlier version of this announcement identified the course as JPW 397. It should be JPW 393.

Tip sheet: Writing stories based on data

by Leave a Comment

By Mirkolorenz (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Mirkolorenz (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
In getting ready for a new semester, I came across this tip sheet from a computer-assisted reporting class I taught a decade ago. Hivemind, what would you add or change to make it relevant to today’s media landscape? One thing I would add would be some tips on automating data collection.

Writing stories based on data: things to remember

1. It’s about the story, not the numbers. The data are just a means of illustrating a point. Make it clear why your data matters.
2. Corollary #1: find your focus and stick to it. It’s likely that during your reporting, you will come across a lot of interesting information that doesn’t fit your story. Lose it. As Faulkner is reported to have said, in writing, “you must kill all of your darlings.”
3. When comparing statistics, make sure the comparisons are valid. This is a problem that often occurs when looking at data over time. For example, some years, the government changed the way it counted unemployment statistics. A longitudinal comparison of unemployment rates would need to take that into account. Another example that we discussed in class concerned the way various states defined “sex crimes” for reporting purposes under Megan’s Law. SAT scores are another well-known example.
4. Corollary to #3: if you are comparing two sets of similar data, make note of differences in sampling methods, error margins or other differences that might reduce the validity of the comparison.
5. Place examples in context – but make sure it’s the right context. For example, let’s say I report that Osama bin Laden’s family has given millions of dollars to Harvard University. (This is true.) I would convey the wrong impression if I didn’t also point out that Osama bin Laden was estranged from his family, which denounced his terrorist activities. In addition, Osama’s brother is a Harvard graduate, which explains part of the relationship between the family and the university.
6. Make sure your data and analyses come from authoritative sources. If an individual who works for an organization makes an assertion about an organization’s history or policies, get written documentation or verification where possible. The employee might be repeating something he or she has heard, and it may or may not be accurate.
7. Corollary: The same thing is true for people who work in highly-specialized fields such as health care or law. When I worked in oncology, one of my jobs was to edit a publication that would provide allied health professionals with accurate, research-based information about cancer, because we were constantly getting calls from people who called us about information they had been given by a nurse or other medical professional that turned out to be inaccurate.

Kevin Michael Brooks, Technology Storyteller

by Leave a Comment

A pioneer in the field of interactive storytelling has left the earthly stage. Kevin Michael Brooks — designer, author, researcher — lost his battle with pancreatic cancer March 28, 2014. He was 55. His death was announced by his wife, fellow storyteller Laura Packer, who also posted this online obituary.

I only interacted directly with Kevin a few times in person and online, and I would not presume to count myself among his intimates. He made friends easily, and had many admirers among the his colleagues at the various places where he studied and worked (degrees from Drexel, Stanford and MIT, and positions at Apple, Motorola and Hallmark.), and in the vast community of oral storytellers and audiences at events such as Massmouth. But I feel privileged to have been in his presence, to have experienced his enthusiasm and expansive intellect and to have been warmed by the light of his smile. And so, I did not want to let this moment pass without encouraging those who are interested in computational thinking, interactive journalism and user experience design to delve into his work.

Take the time to watch this 2012 eMedia chat in which Brooks explains his evolution as a storyteller, and how he came to understand the centrality of storytelling to effective user experience design, and the importance of understanding audience (or users) to effective storytelling.

For a deeper dive, Brooks’ 1999 doctoral dissertation for MIT Media Lab, Metalinear Cinematic Narrative: Theory, Process and Tool is worth reading. In this work, Brooks proposed the term metalinear narrative to describe the underlying structure needed to make multithreaded user-defined stories work effectively. He was grappling with the central problem of how to translate the building blocks of a story into structured data that a reader can assemble in multiple ways without losing its coherence. He created a software tool, Agent Stories, that was intended to assist storytellers in creating metalinear narratives. While software has move on since then, most notably in game design, the questions raised in Brooks’ work are still relevant.

Brooks’ post-MIT work applied these insights to user-experience design. I recall sitting in the audience as he explained how he created an interactive film to help Motorola’s engineers think through the design of its OnStar(TM) navigation service. He also coauthored a book with Whitney Quesenbery, Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design.

Kevin’s personal journey is also inspiring to those of us who are concerned with broadening participation in computing. He was an African American male who matriculated through Philadelphia’s public schools in the 1960s and 70s. He had aspirations to work in two fields – film and computer science – where few people looked like him. Not only that, but he had those aspirations at a time when students where told that these interests were mutually exclusive. Now, computer science educators strain to find ways to help students understand the creative potential of computing, and the use of media as a pedagogical platform and strategy is far more common.

It is my profound hope that people in the field of computational journalism, organizational communications, news design and user experience design will study Kevin’s work and build upon it. Rest in peace, Kevin, and thank you.

I’ll leave you with something fun: