Locations

• Wednesday meetings are always at Bloomberg Center Room 165.
• Monday meetings rotate, with location noted below for each.

Schedule and materials

Readings are not final until 2 weeks before each class time. The slides of past lectures are available online.

Unit 1: Welcome

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

• Why Tech, Media and Democracy?

Monday, January 28, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Welcome
• Location: The New York Times
• Special guests: Marc Lacey (National Editor, The New York Times) and Nick Rockwell (Executive Vice President and CTO, The New York Times).

Unit 2: Data and Platform Journalism

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

• Data Journalism: Getting online data
• Mandatory reading: Silver, N. (2014, March 17). What the Fox Knows. Five Thirty Eight.
• Mandatory reading: Confessore, N., Dance, J.X.G., Harris, R., & Hansen, M. (2018, January 27). The Follower Factory. The New York Times.
• Other reading: Cohen, S., Hamilton, J.T. and Turner, F. (2011). Computational journalism. Communications of the ACM, 54(10), pp.66–71. (Needs university access)
• Other reading: Coddington, M. (2015). Clarifying journalism’s quantitative turn: A typology for evaluating data journalism, computational journalism, and computer-assisted reporting. Digital Journalism, 3(3), 331-348. (Needs university access)

Monday, February 4, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Data Journalism
• Location: Columbia University, Pulizer Hall. The building is located at 2950 Broadway, on the south east corner of 116 and Broadway. You enter from the south side of the building, so it’s best to enter campus at the 115th street gate on Broadway. The Lecture Hall is on the 3rd floor, which is one flight up from the lobby (the lobby being the second floor)
• Special Guest: Michael Keller (New York Times investigations team)

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

• Data Journalism: Studying tech and algorithms
• Mandatory reading: Diakopoulos, N. (2018). The Algorithms Beat: Angles and Methods for Investigation. The Data Journalism Handbook 2.
• Mandatory reading: Angwin, J., Parris, T., & Mattu, S. (2016, September 28). Breaking the Black Box. ProPublica. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Don’t worry they are short)
• Other reading: Sandvig, C., Hamilton, K., Karahalios, K., & Langbort, C. (2014). Auditing algorithms: Research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms. Data and discrimination: converting critical concerns into productive inquiry, 1-23.
• Other reading: Larson, J., Mattu, S., Kirchner, L. and Angwin, J. (2016, May 23). How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm. ProPublica.

Unit 3: The Problem with Platforms and Algorithms

Monday, February 11, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Platform Problems
• Location: Columbia University, Pulizer Hall
• Special guests: Mellisa Ryan and Clint Watts.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

• Platform mechanisms
• Mandatory reading: Grimmelmann, J. (2018). The Platform is the Message. Georgetown Law Technology Review, Rev. 217.
• Mandatory reading: Zuckerman, E. (2018, December 9). We Make the Media – a recent speech at Freedom of Speech Online 2018. Blog post.
• Other reading: Scissors, L., Burke, M., & Wengrovitz, S. (2016, February). What’s in a Like?: Attitudes and behaviors around receiving Likes on Facebook. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 1501-1510). ACM. (discipline: IS/quantitative)
• Other reading: Muchnik, L., Aral, S., & Taylor, S. J. (2013). Social influence bias: A randomized experiment. Science, 341(6146), 647-651.

Monday, February 18, 2019

• Platform algorithms: news feed, trends, social recommendations and bubbles
• Location: Bloomberg 061 Special time: 6:05pm
• Mandatory reading: Koumchatzky, N., & Andryeyev, A. (2017, May 9). Using Deep Learning at Scale in Twitter’s Timelines. Twitter Official Blog.
• Mandatory reading: Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. Penguin. (Introduction only, access with Cornell account)
• Other reading: Eslami, M., Rickman, A., Vaccaro, K., Aleyasen, A., Vuong, A., Karahalios, K., … & Sandvig, C. (2015, April). I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to her: Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 153-162). ACM. (discipline: IS/qualitative)
• Other reading: Covington, P., Adams, J., & Sargin, E. (2016, September). Deep neural networks for youtube recommendations. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 191-198). ACM. (discipline: CS)

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

• Ads, privacy and targeting
• Mandatory viewing: Frontline. (2018, October 29/30). The Facebook Dilemma. PBS. (Part 1 and 2, also available on YouTube)
• Mandatory reading: Hendrix, J., & Carroll, D. (2017, May 4). Confronting a Nightmare for Democracy. Medium post.
• Other reading: Speicher, T., Ali, M., Venkatadri, G., Ribeiro, F., Arvanitakis, G., Benevenuto, F., … & Mislove, A. (2018). Potential for Discrimination in Online Targeted Advertising. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*) (Vol. 81, pp. 1-15). (discipline: CS)
• Other reading: Goldfarb, A., & Tucker, C. E. (2011). Privacy regulation and online advertising. Management science, 57(1), 57-71. (discipline: SS/quantitative)

Monday, February 25, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Movie Screening: Dark Money
• Location: Cornell Tech, Bloomberg Center Auditorium (directions)
• Special guest: Kimberly Reed (director, Dark Money).
• (Cornell Tech optional, February Break)

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

• Online communities and content moderation
• Mandatory reading: Gillespie, T. (2018, June 6). How Social Network Set the Limits of What We Can Say Online. Wired.
• Mandatory reading: Matias, N. (2017, December 13). Remaking Large-Scale Behavioral Research for Democracy. Medium post.
• Other reading: Chandrasekharan, E., Samory, M., Jhaver, S., Charvat, H., Bruckman, A., Lampe, C., … & Gilbert, E. (2018). The Internet’s Hidden Rules: An Empirical Study of Reddit Norm Violations at Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 32.
• Other reading: Seering, J., Kraut, R., & Dabbish, L. (2017, February). Shaping pro and anti-social behavior on twitch through moderation and example-setting. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 111-125). ACM.

Monday, March 4, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Journalism, Data and Algorithms
• Location: Columbia University, Pulizer Hall.

Unit 4: Credibility, Trust, and Misinformation

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

• Information disorder.
• Special Guest: Claire Wardle, First Draft News
• Mandatory reading: Wardle, C. (2017, February 16). Fake News. It’s Complicated.. First Draft.
• Mandatory reading: Caplan, R., Hanson, L., & Donovan, J. (2018). Dead Reckoning Navigating Content Moderation After “Fake News”. Data & Society. (Part 1 only, pages 1-15)
• Other reading: Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. (discipline: SS/quantitative)
• Other reading: Guess, A., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. (2019). Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook. Science Advances, 5(1).

Monday, March 11, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Platform problems and misinformation
• Location: NYU (Pfizer Auditorium in Metrotech)
• Special guests: Donie O’Sullivan (CNN), and Sarah Myers West (AI Now).

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

• Fake news: Present and future
• Mandatory reading: Warzel, C. (2018. February 11). He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He’s Worried About An Information Apocalypse.. Buzzfeed.
• Mandatory reading: Boylan, J.F. (2018, October 17). Will Deep-Fake Technology Destroy Democracy?. The New York Times.
• Other reading: Suwajanakorn, S., Seitz, S. M., & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I. (2017). Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 36(4), 95.
• Other reading: Conroy, N. J., Rubin, V. L., & Chen, Y. (2015, November). Automatic deception detection: Methods for finding fake news. In Proceedings of the 78th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Information Science with Impact: Research in and for the Community (p. 82). American Society for Information Science.

Monday, March 18, 2019

• Credibility and trust
• Location: Bloomberg 061 Special time: 6:05pm
• Mandatory reading: Jarvis, J. (2018, October 31). Aggregating Signals of Quality in News. Medium post.
• Mandatory reading: Gill, S. (2018, December 31). What 2018 Has Taught Us about Building a Stronger Future for American Democracy. Medium post.
• Other reading: Jakesch, M., Koren, M., Evtushenko, A., & Naaman, M. (2019). The Role of Source, Headline and Expressive Responding in Political News Evaluation. Computation + Journalism Symposium 2019.
• Other reading: Zhang, A. X., Ranganathan, A., Metz, S. E., Appling, S., Sehat, C. M., Gilmore, N., … & Bice, E. (2018, April). A structured response to misinformation: defining and annotating credibility indicators in news articles. In Companion of the The Web Conference 2018 on The Web Conference 2018 (pp. 603-612). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

• Fact checking, meme tracking, and other tools to combat misinformation
• Mandatory reading: Caplan, R., Hanson, L., & Donovan, J. (2018). Dead Reckoning Navigating Content Moderation After “Fake News”. Data & Society. (Part 2 only, pages 16-28)
• Mandatory reading: Adair, B. (2018, July 24). Beyond the Truth-O-Meter. Columbia Journalism Review.
• Other reading: Wang, X., Yu, C., Baumgartner, S., & Korn, F. (2018, April). Relevant Document Discovery for Fact-Checking Articles. In Companion of the The Web Conference 2018 on The Web Conference 2018 (pp. 525-533). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.
• Other reading: Thorson, E. (2016). Belief echoes: The persistent effects of corrected misinformation. Political Communication, 33(3), 460-480.

Monday, March 25, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Census 2020 and Information Ecosystem
• Location: The New School, 66 West 12th St, Room 404.
• Guests: steven romalewski (CUNY Center for Urban Research), Hansi Lo Wang (NPR)

Unit 5: Adversary

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

• Influence and propaganda campaigns
• Mandatory reading: Ellick, A.B., & Westbrook, A. (2018). Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation from Cold War to Kanye. The New York Times. (Part 1-3)
• Mandatory reading: Diresta, R. (2018, March 8). The Information War Is On. Are We Ready For It?. Wired.
• Other reading: Boyd, R. L., Spangher, A., Fourney, A., Nushi, B., Ranade, G., Pennebaker, J., & Horvitz, E. (2018). Characterizing the Internet Research Agency’s Social Media Operations During the 2016 US Presidential Election using Linguistic Analyses.
• Other reading: Arif, A., Stewart, L. G., & Starbird, K. (2018). Acting the Part: Examining Information Operations Within# BlackLivesMatter Discourse. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, (CSCW), 20.

Monday, April 1, 2019

• SPRING BREAK

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

• SPRING BREAK

Monday, April 8, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Hackathon Prep
• Location: Cornell Tech, Tata Innovation Center 141

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

• Biased, risky, fringe, and extreme content
• Mandatory reading: Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and disinformation online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute. (pages 1-39)
• Mandatory reading: O’Donovan, C., Warzel, C., McDonald, L., Clifton, B., Woolf, M. (2019, February 24). We Followed YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Down The Rabbit Hole. BuzzFeed News.
• Other reading: Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G., & Suarez-Tangil, G. (2018). On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.12512.
• Other reading: Chandrasekharan, E., Pavalanathan, U., Srinivasan, A., Glynn, A., Eisenstein, J., & Gilbert, E. (2017). You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW), 31. (Discipline: CS/QSS)

Hackathon

Saturday, April 13, 8:30 AM - 7:00 PM

• HACKATHON
• Location: RLab, Brooklyn Navy Yard

Unit 6: A New Hope

Monday, April 15, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Local News Innovation
• Location: CUNY Newmark J-School, room 308, 219 W 40th St.
• Special Guest: Jere Heste, The City

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

• Towards a healthy public sphere
• Mandatory reading: Roy, D., Stevens, R., Yi, E., & Cramer, K. (2018, November 9). Let’s Gather Around the “Digital Hearth”. The Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy.
• Mandatory reading: Watts, D. J., & Rothschild, D. M. (2017, December 5). Don’t Blame the Election on Fake News. Blame It on the Media. Columbia Journalism Review.
• Other reading: Kriplean, T., Morgan, J., Freelon, D., Borning, A., & Bennett, L. (2012, February). Supporting Reflective Public Thought with ConsiderIt. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 265-274). ACM.
• Other reading: Munson, S. A., & Resnick, P. (2010, April). Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How much. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1457-1466). ACM.

Monday, April 22, 2019

• Media innovation 1: AI and automation in journalism
• Location: Bloomberg 061 Special time: 6:05pm
• Hackathon report due
• Mandatory reading: LeCompte, C. (2015, September 1). Automation in the Newsroom. Nieman Reports.
  • Mandatory reading: Marconi, F., & Siegman, A. (2017). A day in the life of a journalist in 2027: Reporting meets AI. Columbia Journalism Review.
  • Other reading: Lokot, T., & Diakopoulos, N. (2016). News Bots: Automating News and Information Dissemination on Twitter. Digital Journalism, 4(6), 682-699.
  • Other reading: Matatov, H., Bechhofer, A., Aroyo, L., Amir, O., & Naaman, M. DejaVu: A System for Journalists to Collaboratively Address Visual Misinformation. Computational Journalism Symposium 2019.
  • Special Guest: Lisa Gibbs, Director of news partnerships, Associated Press and Ali Velshi (MSNBC and NBC News).

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

• Media innovation 2: Tech-supported future of journalism and media
• Mandatory reading: Coolidge, M. (2017, December 5). Journalism’s Funding Model is Broken; Here’s How We Propose Fixing It. Medium post.
• Mandatory reading: Bell, E. (2019, January 18). Facebook Should Treat the Cause, Not the Symptoms, of Journalism’s Plight. Columbia Journalism Review.
• Other reading: Leonhardt, D., Galinsky, J., Rudoren, J., Skog, K., Lacey, M., Giratikanon, T., & Evans, T. (2017, January). Journalism That Stands Apart. (discipline: journalism/business/innovation)
• Other reading: [TBD]

Monday, April 29, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Local news and platforms
• Location: CUNY Newmark JSchool

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

• Review, summary, and final preparations

Monday, May 6, 2019

• ALL City-wide Session: Final Presentations
• Location: Cornell Tech, Bloomberg Center Auditorium

Monday May 13, 2019

• Hackathon project final report due