Earlier this week we hosted a Hacks/Hackers meetup where I offered some Data Therapy to attendees. It was a great chance for me to target my efforts to encourage more creative data presentation at a particular audience - journalists and data scientists. We had a engaging workshop with about 100 people in attendance - lots of insightful questions and conversations about how to tell stories better with data.

image by @AlohaKarina

Data Therapy is my ongoing effort to bridge the gap between data presentation tools and folks that aren't data geeks. As more and more tools lower the barrier to entry for creating data presentation, we need to help burgeoning data scientists learn how to pick the appropriate techniques for presenting their data to their audience, based on the data and their goals

Congratulations to the team behind CRONICAS DE HEROES for the recent Honorary Mention in PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA, Digital Communities category. PRIX ARS is one of the most important annual awards in the field of electronic art, interactive, animation, digital culture, and music

http://prix2012.aec.at/prixwinner/5056/

CRONICAS DE HEROES is civic platform of positivism which through technology, art, education, direct insertion, and other media focuses and promotes social values. We are a team of volunteers, promoters and local representatives who work with the support of the community. Contact us to be part of this initiative, to support by donating talent or funds, with questions, etc at info@cronicasdeheroes.mx

Richard Gingras (@richardgingras), head of News Products at Google, spoke at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard today. I liveblogged it, so let me know where the errors are and I'll fix them.

Members of Press Pass TV (Press Pass, http://presspasstv.org/) and members of the Center for Civic Media met last week for a codesign workshop to explore using NewJack in the Press Pass Respect in Reporting (RIP) campaign that seeks to establish new standards among journalists writing about violence.

Press Pass describes the RIP campaign: “When facts are missed or people are misrepresented, families, neighbors and community spend time and energy needed to grieve and move forward instead fighting to preserve the memories of their loved ones and restore their reputations. And when irrelevant information like addresses and hospitals are reported, innocent lives are put at risk. At Press Pass TV, we believe in the unlimited power of media to awaken individuals, create dialogue across race, religious and ethnic lines and empower communities to shape their own destiny. The Respect in Reporting campaign is an opportunity for news outlets to partner with communities to shape a more just and equitable future for all of the neighborhoods that they serve.”

Read a detailed run-down on our blog: civic.mit.edu/blog/mstem/jay-rosens-three-layer-journalism-cake

Co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Media; Comparative Media Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies

New communications technologies are revolutionizing our experience of news and information. The avalanche of news, gossip, and citizen reporting available on the web is immensely valuable but also often deeply unreliable. How can professional reporters and editors help to assure that quality journalism will be recognized and valued in our brave new digital world?

The last two days of the Truthiness conference, co-hosted by the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and MIT's Center for Civic Media, exposed a rich cross-section of people, research, and applications dedicated to fighting misinformation in its many forms. We spent the day Tuesday discussing the wide world of facts and falsehoods, with an embarrassing collection of brains on hand to inform us on the history, cognitive psychology, and best practices of encouraging a healthy respect for reality. The challenge ahead, now that all the mini eclairs are gone, is to convert the goodwill, knowledge, and collaboration generated by this conference into a united front against delusion. Here's my pitch.

How can designers imagine innovative technologies for news and journalism? I think I know the answer. In this post, I propose a model and demonstrate it by picking apart the "Profile article" for innovative ideas. The resulting design is a browser plugin which can attach writers' tools to any text form on the web.

I'm currently taking Ethan Zuckerman's class on News in the Age of Participatory Media, a compressed intro to journalism for engineers. In principle, we're a group of engineers trying to learn enough about journalism to imagine new technologies to support journalism and media-making in general. In practice, that's a really hard thing to do. People could genuinely argue that we're only half-learning journalism in a fraction of the time students take in journalism school. Furthermore, we also need to think about technology. How can we do that?

Our Civic Lunch this week featured Jake Shapiro, CEO of Public Radio International (PRX), as well as guest John Bracken from the Knight Foundation (which funds the Center for Civic Media).

Do social networks inherently support democratic values, in contrast with ideology-bound political institutions?

At the MIT Media Lab Friday, former Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar talked about what it took for the news company to reimagine itself and listen to networks during the Arab Spring. He was joined by Mohamed Nanabhay, head of New Media at Al Jazeera, who discussed their new challenge of shifting media coverage from the spectacle of protest to the politics of building a new society. [Update: a video of the talk has been posted to the Media Lab blog]

Last Wednesday, immediately prior to attending an event on media diets, we presented a week's compilation of our own media diets. The day's scheduled events were rather meta with regards to conscious information consumption, and this turned out to be, in many ways, a theme of my diet.

Not counting this assignment, other meta media experiences included: