The Tech Data Journalism Bootcamp was developed in collaboration with the Center for Civic Media. We invited speakers from Civic and The Boston Globe to create active seminars teaching journalists from The Tech the basics of how to find, analyze, and present a data piece. A hands-on workshop followed the seminars so students could work with real data—data from the pressure survey. Thanks to Joanna and Chris for organizing the event, to all the speakers for their time, and to David, Joanna, and Kiran for helping liveblog and take photos!

Thanks to Luis for helping scribe, and to Molly and Charlie for filling in for our instructors!

We kick off today's class by watching We Are Legion, a film about the hacktivist collective Anonymous. Sasha and Becky are at a conference, so today's class is being led by our classmate Molly, and Charlie DeTar. Molly adds a disclaimer: the film is a fan letter, not a documentary. There are different tactics for civil disobedience: Denial of Service (Dos/DDoS) attacks, information dispersal, more participatory actions (e.g. Habbo Hotel). We start by delving into the readings and discussing our thoughts about the forms that civil disobedience may take online.

Loki notes that, despite the way in which Anonymous has been antagonized, they have done little real harm. Compare this with Gandhi, whose Salt March led to the death of over 200 people.

There are certainly parallels between Project Chanology's leak of Tom Cruise's Scientology video to the leak of the Pentagon Papers.

The Sudden Realization Romney image macro that emerged during the aftermath of the election.

This post was co-written with the help of Loki. Thanks to the rest of the class for helping us keep good notes!

We start off this week's class with a quick recap of our blog posts from the previous class, discussing our various models of social change. Joanna describes her Magic School Bus-inspired story, tying it back into her project proposal of analyzing different commenting systems. She and Sasha discussed different domain areas of online commenting as civic media, such as systematic commenting and linkspamming. The model of change described in the story involves a chain of linked tweets and a YouTube comment cascading into a greater petition. The wider debate underlying the story, of course, involves clicktivism—do things like mass emails and online petitions really make a difference? Sasha says that there are hierarchies of value and weighting systems that determine when an elected official will actually pay attention to a particular issue.

From political economy to Marxist theory, theories of globalization to the propaganda model, our readings from last week were rather dense, to say the least. While delving into the literature is certainly important (it was one of my original goals for the class), it's also important to keep in mind what is sometimes referred to as the "translational" work of research and academia. Here in CMS.360, we are fans of using highly elaborate visual metaphors to do this. In last week's task, we were tasked with developing a model of social change. In top form, Loki, Aviva, and I came up with the following diagram to illustrate how ideas proliferate through society, gain traction, and ultimately instigate social change:

Internet memes and image macros—once relegated to marginal/niche online communities and subcultures such as the boards of 4chan—have in the past few years broken into the public consciousness to become an integral part of modern popular culture. We see stories about viral videos and meme culture in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Today, these internet memes are not only based on referential or non-sequitur humor, but have taken on the topics of civic media, commenting on current events, political affairs, and social issues. Certainly, Know Your Meme is filled with election-related image macros, and Tumblr is even running live animated gif coverage of the upcoming presidential debates.

PREVIOUSLY, ON CMS.360...
Last week, the Intro to Civic Media class tackled the issue of digital inequality, first by looking at how the discourse around universal access has evolved over time. In the 90s, the dominant narrative was that of "the digital divide"—a binary classification that separates the haves from the have-nots. Since then, new research on the topic has helped broaden this framing into one of digital inequality, a more nuanced metric based on a number of important factors such as age, race, and socioeconomic status. As illustrated by the graphs shown in Eszter Hargittai's paper "The Digital Reproduction of Inequality" (shown below), information technologies have not successfully democratized American society; rather, they have exacerbated existing inequalities by "increasing the opportunities available to the already privileged while leading to the growing marginalization of the disadvantaged."

Hello everybody! As you may have noticed, this is not my first time posting to the Civic Media blog—previously, I liveblogged ROFLcon III as well as the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. However, I've never had an opportunity to formally introduce myself to the Center for Civic Media and the broader online community surrounding it. I just started my sophomore year here at MIT, where I'm majoring in Comparative Media Studies and (hopefully also) Computer Science. Last semester, I worked with Sasha, Rahul, and Becky as a graphic/UI designer for Vojo, a community-based mobile blogging platform optimized for low-cost cell phones. This semester I'm continuing my involvement with the Center in an academic capacity, as I'm taking Sasha's Intro to Civic Media class.

Michael Maness leads the Knight Journalism & Innovation Program. In the closing presentation of the conference, he takes the stage to present "moments of profundity": the key takeaways and open questions generated over the past two days.

If we were to start CNN today, it might look more like one of the networks featured in this panel. We take a whirlwind tour of new news networks and new models for reporting and sharing information in our connected age.