PJNet

Georgia Tech is hosting a Symposium on Computation and Journalism February 22-23, 2008. One of the keynote speakers is Michael Skoler from my former employer Minnesota Public Radio. He’ll be talking about Public Insight Journalism; the other keynoter is Krishna Bharat, principal scientist at Google and creator of Google News. Sounds like a fantastic combination.

I will be moderating a panel on Friday afternoon Feb. 22 entitled Ubiquitous Journalism. What does that mean? As one of the journalists and not one of the computer folks, I am not 100 percent sure. But here is how it was described to me by Nicholas Diakopoulos, one of the conference organizers:

Ubiquitous Journalism is our invented term for how the data flowing from large networks of sensors and/or people can be applied to journalism. In the Ubiquitous Journalism Panel we’re exploring big news data flows, whether they’re coming from lots of digital sensors in confined geography, or from lots of human reporters globally. The discussion will point to how these streams and the systems that handle them lead to public knowledge and public impact.

Of course, journalists, at least this former one, might be a bit intimidated by that description, but that’s why we have to get together with the computational folks. I have some serious reading to get done before my moderation. Here is the whole panel:

• Jenny Preece, Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, developing 911.gov, a prototype Community Response Grid
• Mark Hansen, Co-PI of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing , creator of sensorbase.org
• Amra Tareen, Founder and CEO, AllVoices.com
• Leah Culver,  Founder of Pownce, a San Francisco-based micro-blogging service

Here too is a new course Computation and Journalism at Ga. Tech being taught by the conference organizer Irfan Essa. I am having lunch with him next week and talking to this class about civic and citizen journalism 

Very cool stuff. I am excited by the possibilities.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Computation Journalism, Georgia Tech, Participatory journalism, Reinventing Journalism, Uncategorized, conference, crowdfunding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.