Networks / Friday, January 27, 2017 from 5pm-7pm

The Transparency Series is unique set of seminars and hands-on workshops that bring new technology and design ideas to the community of Columbia Journalism.

In this series, Networks, we will consider data that describe networks of people and organizations (often called “graphs"). These are structures that don’t fit easily into a spreadsheet — they encode relationships. Who knows who? Who worked for the same company? Who donated to or lobbied for which campaign? Who retweets who? These kinds of data let us connect the dots between people and organizations. Where are conflicts of interest? Can we track money or influence? On social media, can we see important “influencers” or visualize groups of people who share specific kinds of content?

The world is a complicated place, and sometimes it's not the things themselves that's the story, but the connections between the things. two speakers whose projects transform these connections between things into first-rate journalism. The first is Kevin Connor, the director of the Public Accountability Initiative (PAI) and co-founder of LittleSis.org (think the opposite of Big Brother), an online wiki database tracking information on powerful people and organizations. Then we will hear from Mar Cabra, head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Data & Research Unit. She led a global team from ICIJ analyzing the 11.5 million documents in the famed Panama Papers leak.

Kevin Connor is the director of the Public Accountability Initiative (PAI), a watchdog research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. PAI conducts "power research," investigative research that brings transparency to how power relationships shape policy in the United States. PAI's research has consistently challenged the role of big money and corporate power in our democracy, garnering major media attention and prompting significant accountability measures and reforms. PAI takes a data-driven, movement-oriented approach to its work, and develops and maintains LittleSis.org (the opposite of Big Brother), an online wiki database tracking information on powerful people and organizations. Kevin co-founded PAI and LittleSis.org in 2008. Prior to that, he worked as a strategic researcher at SEIU and as a freelance corporate accountability researcher. His freelance projects included an early analysis of Wall Street banks’ role in causing the financial crisis.

Mar Cabra is the head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Data & Research Unit, which produces the organization's key data work and also develops tools for better collaborative investigative journalism. She has been an ICIJ staff member since 2011, and is also a member of the network.

Mar fell in love with data while being a Fulbright scholar and fellow at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University in 2009/2010. Since then, she's promoted data journalism in her native Spain, co-creating the first ever masters degree on investigative reporting, data journalism and visualization and the national data journalism conference.

She previously worked in television (BBC, CCN+ and laSexta Noticias) and her work has been featured in the International Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, PBS, El País, El Mundo or El Confidencial, among others. In 2012 she received the Spanish Larra Award to the country's most promising journalist under 30.

The Transparency Series - Networks

Data Visualization / Friday, May 5, 2017 from 5pm-6pm

Join Manuel Lima for a fascinating tour through millennia of circular information design in architecture, urban planning, fine art, design, fashion, technology, religion, cartography, biology, astronomy and physics in a visual feast for infographics enthusiasts. From Venn diagrams and early celestial charts to the trefoil biohazard symbol and Target’s corporate logo, Lima provides a history of humanity's long-lasting obsession with all things circular and a unique taxonomy of the many varieties of circle diagrams.

In addition to the presentation, Lima will be selling and signing his latest work, 'Book of Circles'.Registration is not required to attend the event.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009,” Manuel Lima is the founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Google, and a regular teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design.

Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, MIT, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various magazines and newspapers, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Creative Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Grafik, SEED, étapes, and El País.

The Transparency Series - Data Visualization

The climate crisis poses a unique challenge to journalism. It touches every part of society, from politics and business to sports and culture, yet in many situations, we barely mention it. Journalists can help to change this. There is a climate story for every beat: Facebook’s new server farms are being built in the Arctic, not the desert, as the company anticipates rising temperatures; Wine regions are shifting around the world; Qualifying events for the Tokyo Olympics this summer were shortened due to the extreme heat. To meet the challenge, we need journalists with diverse expertise and perspectives to normalize talking about climate change in every part of the news.

On Thursday 26 September, in the midst of Climate Week, The Brown Institute, in partnership with the Earth Institute at Columbia University, invite you to take part in an evening event exploring new ways to convey challenges and choices around climate change with greater engagement and impact. The evening will begin with a conversation between Somini Sengupta, a New York Times reporter covering social disparities in environmental impacts, Moses Shumow, documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor at Emerson College, and John Upton, who’s building partnerships between local newsrooms and Climate Central, a prize-winning data-driven climate-communication hub, to create locally-relevant stories around global warming. Together, they will help to unveil the challenges to reporting on a changing climate and how the beat might need to adapt.

A Science-Media Meetup for Climate Stories With Impact

Nearly 150,000 people in 30 countries have visited the Glassroom; an interactive public intervention reflecting on the impact of technology on society. As the doors of the Glassroom open in San Francisco, its co-curator Stephanie Hankey gives a sneak preview of the conversation they expect to have as they bring this critical exhibition to the home of Big tech. Digging inside some of the issues presented there, she will talk about Tactical Tech’s groundbreaking work investigating over 350 companies who sell personal data for political influence and why we should care. She will share insights from their latest work ‘Efficiency and Madness’ critiquing blindspots in technology design, as well as their struggle to answer the most commonly asked question of all, ‘what can we do?’. 

Stephanie Hankey is a designer, technologist, and social entrepreneur who has worked internationally at the intersection of technology and human rights for the past 20 years. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Tactical Tech, a Berlin-based NGO that since 2003 has worked with millions of people worldwide, helping them better understand how to control their data, digital privacy and security. She is the co-founder of the creative agency Tactical Studios and the co-curator of the exhibition Nervous Systems and the traveling exhibition: The Glass Room. She teaches, writes and consults to companies, NGOs and governments on the ethical design of technology, has a degree in Design History, and an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art. She was a visiting fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard and a Visiting Industry Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University.

The Distinguished Lectures in Computational Innovation series highlights programmers, data scientists, and other practitioners from the private sector who lead cutting-edge technology initiatives such as Python, C++, and the Open Source Initiative. The events, which take place over the fall and spring semesters, include a presentation, Question & Answer session, and networking reception. All Columbia University students, faculty, postdocs, and administrators are welcome to register and attend these events. The Brown Institute for Media Innovation is proud to partner with the Foundations for Research Computing program and the Data Science Institute for the Distinguished Lectures series.