Exploring how the technology can help newsrooms, how investigations have revealed the impact of AI on communities, and how journalists can move beyond narratives of hype or despair.
GIJN’s weekly, curated look at the Top 10 in Data Journalism highlights bats and predicting the location of the next pandemic, China’s electric battery dominance, and mapping out Brazil’s healthcare “holes.”
Converting text documents like PDFs to spreadsheets is tedious and expensive work. To see how well AI tool ChatGPT can extract data from PDFs, data journalist Brandon Roberts wrote a Python script to convert two document sets to spreadsheets.
Rainforest Investigations Network fellow Hyury Potter used data reporting and machine learning to investigate the link between clandestine airstrips and illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon during the past two years.
Mattia Peretti, manager of JournalismAI at the London School of Economics, discusses the 10 things reporters should know about how artificial intelligence can impact journalism.
Satellite imagery provides information that can enhance the ability to write compelling narratives about the state of our planet, cutting across multiple beats. But such a tool tends to be complex and out of the reach for many journalists, so this guide offers a process that reporters interested in covering the climate crisis can use for story projects.
Investigative journalists went all out last year in covering surveillance issues. From a deep-dive into the dark side of pandemic tech in Singapore’s techno-utopia to an in-depth look at how schools are spending thousands on unreliable “aggression detectors” in the name of student safety, global reporters have been holding Big Tech accountable for its role in fueling authoritarianism worldwide.
With more sophisticated AI technologies emerging, researchers warn that “deepfake geography” could become a growing problem. As a result, a team of researchers that set out to identify new ways of detecting fake satellite photos warn of the dangers of falsified geospatial data and call for a system of geographic fact-checking.
Around the world, people are toning down their celebrations in a bid to mitigate spread of the coronavirus. The latest casualty: Thanksgiving. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 16 to 22 found FiveThirtyEight’s timely piece explaining the risk of COVID-19 transmission from even small Thanksgiving dinner gatherings. Also popular: The New York Times tracking the status of all vaccine trials in progress, and The Pudding analysis of race and gender in crossword puzzles from five major US news publications.
What was the magnitude of the Beirut port blast and how did it compare to other infamous explosions in history? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 31 to September 6 finds Reuters illustrating just how powerful last month’s blast was in relation to the Chernobyl disaster and other explosions. The Tampa Bay Times highlighted how a county sheriff’s office is using an algorithm to supposedly predict and intercept the criminals of the future, while The New York Times used satellite maps to show how physical and political geographies interact across the United States. ESPN has been looking into the potential of people in college football crowds to become COVID-19 super-spreaders, and Slate analyzed the overuse of the word “murmur” in the popular Twilight novel series.
