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The Clwstwr news projects — update

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Clwstwr is a five-year programme in south Wales — run from Cardiff — that was started to encourage the development of original screen-related projects. ‘Screen’ here means anything that involves creative or technological industries in a broad sense. Since it was set up in early 2019, it has allocated funding and development support to 23 different projects to allow for original research and development.

Many of the projects have been underway for close to a year at this stage (a full list of the projects is here) and a few of them are of particular interest to us since they are working on news:

Artificial Intelligence in the newsroom

This project is investigating how to put the resources of the deep web at the disposal of working journalists, by using artificial intelligence. It’s run by the Cardiff team of Amplyfi, a company that uses tech for business intelligence, and the project aims to  develop technology that will identify new entities that are emerging in the deep web, and especially new relationships between those entities.

Extracting court information for the press

The team behind the Caerphilly Observer are running this project, which will deal with court information (who’s appeared in court, who’s due to appear) that is often either unwieldy or downright inaccessible for journalists. The plan is to gather all this information for Magistrates Courts in Wales and make it available to journalists through a searchable database, which would greatly aid press coverage of local courts.

New ways of telling news stories

What’s the best way to tell a news story? This project is trying to answer this question by looking firstly at how people understand and response to stories in general, and then by designing new journalism techniques that will allow the press to tell stories in the most effective way possible. It’s a radical re-evaluation of a journalistic storytelling tradition that has long worked just on the basis of ‘that’s how we’ve always done it!’.

News in school

This project will design “a pilot for regular news service delivered to pupils within school hours”. The idea is that teachers can use this service to complement their teaching and that a new generation of young people will be introduced to the idea of staying informed.

Digital Needles in the Data Haystack

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We’re presenting today at “Investigating (with) Big Data“, a one day symposium being held at Cardiff University by the Digital Culture Network. Our talk, “Digital Needles in the Data Haystack” examines the use of data by news organisations, focusing on the challenges they face when carrying out investigations with increasingly large volumes of data. We discuss the collaborations that organisations have built to get past such problems, and talk about some of the issues surrounding the use of data within newsrooms.

It looks to be an interesting day of talks on a range of different topics connected to ‘Big Data’, and we’re looking forward to it!

Sustainable Software Institute – Research Data Visualisation Workshop

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Last week I gave a talk and delivered a hands on session at the Sustainable Software Institute’s ‘Research Data Visualisation Workshop‘ which was held at Manchester University. It was a really engaging event, with a lot of good discussion on the issues surrounding data visualisation.

Professor Jessie Kennedy from Edinburgh Napier University gave a great keynote looking at a some key design principles in visualisation, including a number of studies I hadn’t seen before but will definitely be including in my teaching in future.

I gave a talk on ‘Human Science Visualisation’ which really focused on a couple of key issues. Firstly, I tried to illustrate the importance of interactivity in complex visualisations. I then talked about how we as academic researchers need publish our interactive visualisations in posterity, and how we should press academic publishers to help us communicate our data to readers. Finally, I wanted to point people towards the excellent visualisation work being done by data journalists, and that the newsrooms are an excellent source of ideas and tips for data visualisation. The slides for my talk are here. It’s the first time I’ve spoken about visualisation outside of the classroom, and it was a really fun talk to give.

We also had two great talks from Dr Christina Bergmann and Dr Andy South, focusing on issues of biological visualisation and mapping respectively. All the talks generated some good discussion both in the room and online, which was fantastic to see.

In the afternoon I lead a hands on session looking at visualising data using d3. This was the first time I’d taught a session using d3 v4, which made things slightly interesting. I’m not fully up to speed with all the areas of the API that have changed, so getting the live coding right first time was a bit tricky, but I think I managed. Interestingly, I feel that the changes made to the .data(), .exit(), .enter(), update cycle as discussed in Mike’s “What Makes Software Good” make a lot more sense from a teaching perspective. The addition of .merge() in particular helps a great deal. As you might expect from a d3 workshop that lasted a mere three hours, I’m not entirely convinced that everybody ‘got’ it, but I think a most went away satisfied.

Overall it was a very successful workshop. Raniere Silva did an excellent job putting it together and running the day, and I really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people thought about it too.