Conference Schedule

A complete schedule with abstracts can be found here.

This is the schedule for the 2022 C+J Conference to be held at Columbia University. The event will be hybrid, taking place in Pulitzer Hall (the Journalism School) at Columbia and in an online environment hosted on ohyay.co. A link to this environment is sent to all registrants.

All times are in Eastern Daylight Time

Thursday, June 9

Time/Location Description
2:00 - 3:15PM Workshop Set I
  1. Numbers for audience understanding - Laura Santhanam (PBS NewsHour), Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein (Knology), John Voiklis (Knology), Erica Hendry (PBS NewsHour) and Travis Daub (PBS NewsHour)
  2. AI for Everyone: Learnings from the Local News Challenge - Swapneel Mehta (New York University), Christopher Brennan (Overtone), Zhouhan Chen (New York University), Jessica Davis (Gannett Localizer), Matt Macvey (NYC Media Lab), Steve Dorsey (Gannett)
3:30 - 4:45PM Workshop Set II
  1. Identifying social media manipulation with OSoMe tools - Kai-Cheng Yang and Christopher Torres-Lugo (Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University)
  2. Temporal Topologies – Making journalistic authorship transparent through in-depth tagging of newsworthy events - Francesca Morini (Fachhochschule Potsdam)
  3. Using Networks Analysis and Visualization to Explain COVID-19 Spread through the Physical, Social, and Information Graphs - Hong Qu (Harvard Kennedy School)
5:00 - 6:15PM Workshop Set III
  1. How can AI help you? Explore writing with a machine - Lydia Chilton (Columbia University, Computer Science)
  2. Share a Story: A Daily Practice for Teaching Healthy News Habits - Blake Eskin (Journalism + Design)
6:15PM - ? Socialize!
A casual get together at a local watering hole (we'll figure how to bring our virtual attendees along)

Friday, June 10

Time/Location Description
9 - 10AM
Lecture Halle		 Breakfast
10AM - 12:00PM
Lecture Hall		 [1] Invited Session: Conflict Reporting
Examining how data are collected, events are discovered, information presented
  1. Behind The Civilian Casualty Files: Investigating The 'Most Precise' Air War In History - Azmat Khan (Columbia Journalism School)
  2. Mapping Incidents of Civilian Harm in Ukraine - Charlotte Godart (Bellingcat)
  3. How data journalism is responding to the war: What can satellite images say? How do we detect disinformation? What other data can we use? - Roman Kulchynskyj (Editor-in-Chief, Texty.org.ua), Peter Bodnar, Illya Samoilovych (Data journalists, Texty.org.ua)
12:10 - 1:30PM Paper Sessions
Lecture Hall [2] Refereed Papers: Applications of Machine Learning
Three efforts to apply machine learning to both the practice and business of journalism
  1. Generating a Pairwise Dataset for Click-through Rate Prediction of News Articles Considering Positions and Contents - Shotaro Ishihara (Nikkei, Inc.) and Yasufumi Nakama
  2. Detecting Stance of Tweets Toward Truthfulness of Factual Claims - Zhengyuan Zhu, Zeyu Zhang, Foram Patel and Chengkai Li (University of Texas at Arlington)
  3. What’s the Fairest of Them All? Aesthetic Assessment of Visuals - Marc Willhaus, Daniel Vera Nieto, Clara Fernandez and Severin Klingler (Media Technology Center ETH Zurich)
Brown Institute [3] Contributed Session: AI and Investigations
As investigative computational journalists, sometimes we look into the black boxes of algorithms written by other people; and sometimes we write our own AI in order to investigate social problems. Our panel will discuss the opportunities and challenges AI can bring to journalism and investigative reporting, as well as creative strategies for cracking open black boxes and discovering problems. - Bahareh Heravi (University of Surrey), Meredith Broussard (New York University), Julia Angwin (The Markup), Hilke Schellmann (New York University)
607b [4] Contributed Papers: News Analysis
Viewing the news itself, and our consumption of stories, as data. Here is a database of local news sites nationwide, and analyses of the how we look for news and how we interpret stories.
  1. Studying Local News at Scale - Marianne Aubin Le Quéré, Ting-Wei Chiang and Mor Naaman (Cornell Tech)
  2. Mining Questions for Answers: How COVID-19 Questions Differ Globally - Jenna Sherman, Smriti Singh, Scott Hale and Darius Kazemi (Meedan Digital Health Lab, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
  3. Vulnerable Visualizations: How Data Visualizations Are Used to Promote Misinformation Online - Maxim Lisnic, Marina Kogan and Alexander Lex (University of Utah)
  4. Navigating Multi-perspective News Stories By Showing What Is Common, And What Is Debated - Philippe Laban (Salesforce Research), Lidiya Murakhovs'Ka (Salesforce Research), Xiang Anthony Chen (UCLA) and Chien-Sheng Wu (Salesforce Research)
1:30 - 2:30PM
Lecture Hall		 Lunch
2:30 - 4:30PM
Lecture Hall		 [5] Invited Session: COVID Reporting
Attempts to understand the pandemic and its impacts, through computation and visualization (Nick Diakopoulos moderating).
  1. How The Economist estimated the pandemic's true death toll - Sondre Ulvund Solstad and Martín González (The Economist)
  2. The Covid Financial Crisis - Nick Thieme (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
  3. Managing the challenges of data reporting and visualization in year three of the Covid-19 pandemic at The New York Times - Lisa Waananen Jones (Washington State University/The New York Times), Aliza Aufrichtig (The New York Times) and Tiff Fehr (The New York Times)
4:40 - 6:20PM Paper Sessions
Lecture Hall [6] Refereed Papers: Online Communities and Local News
This session is a bit of a mix. The first two talks consider online communities and/as local news, while the last is on "storytelling structures" for data journalism
  1. Comparing open-ended community dialogue with local news - Hope Schroeder, Doug Beeferman and Deb Roy (MIT Center for Constructive Communication)
  2. Local, Social, and Online: Comparing the Perceptions and Impact of Local Online Groups and Local Media Pages on Facebook - Marianne Aubin Le Quéré (Cornell Tech), Mor Naaman (Cornell Tech) and Jenna Fields (Cornell University)
  3. Storytelling Structures in Data Journalism: Introducing the Water Tower structure - Bahareh Heravi (University of Surrey)
Brown Institute [7] Contributed Papers: Collaborations
How do newsrooms collaborate with other newsrooms, with researchers and with the communities they serve? Here we present some examples, from fact-checking, to data collection, to learning how to use AI (Irena Hwang moderating).
  1. The "Arab Fact-Checkers Network" led by ARIJ: How we are strengthening fact-checking to support the whole journalism ecosystem in the MENA region? - Saja Mortada (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism)
  2. Exploring Together: Collaboration as a bedrock of improved use of emerging technologies in journalism - Mattia Peretti (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Jeremy Gilbert (Medill, Northwestern University)
  3. Centering the humans: Leveraging OSINT, digital authentication and rooted storytelling to elevate community voices in algorithmic accountability journalism - Garance Burke (The Associated Press)
  4. Data as distributed content for local newsroom collaborations: Lessons from 5 multi-newsroom projects - Derek Kravitz, Betsy Ladyzhets and Dillon Bergin (MuckRock), and Mohar Chatterjee, Smarth Gupta and Eric Fan (Brown Institute for Media Innovation)
  5. Collaboration on tech for journalism and other cross-domain benefits - Cheryl Phillips (Stanford University) and Lisa Pickoff-White (KQED)
607b [8] Contributed Papers: Stories I
AI and computational tools in support of story development, from low-code frameworks to large language models
  1. OCR Optimized for Images Created by Typesetting - Norihiko Sawa and Masaki Aota (Nikkei)
  2. Complementing language models to improve their applicability to journalism - Jeffrey Nickerson (Stevens Institute of Technology)
  3. Developing low-code tools and pipelines for local data storytelling - Sam Gross, Rob Powell, Matt Albasi, Emilia Ruzicka, Nick Devlin and Elena Cox (Stacker)
  4. NewsEdits: A Roadmap for Computational Journalism - Alexander Spangher, Xiang Ren and Jonathan May (University of Southern California), and Nanyun Peng (UCLA)

Saturday, June 11

Time/Location Description
9 - 10AM
Lecture Hall		 Breakfast
10 - 11:20AM Paper Sessions
Lecture Hall [9] Refereed Papers: Data and/as the news
Three analyses of digital content to understand important social and political movements.
  1. Cataloging Algorithmic Decision Making in the U.S. Government - Grace Lee, Jasmine Sinchai, Daniel Trielli and Nicholas Diakopoulos (Northwestern University)
  2. News as Data for Activists: a case study in feminicide counterdata production - Rahul Bhargava (Northeastern University), Harini Suresh (Data + Feminism Lab & CSAIL, MIT), Amelia Lee Doğan (Data + Feminism Lab, MIT), Wonyoung So (Data + Feminism Lab & DUSP, MIT), Helena Suárez Val (Feminicidio Uruguay & CIM Warwick), Silvana Fumega (ILDA) and Catherine D'Ignazio (Data + Feminism Lab & DUSP, MIT)
  3. Characterizing Social Movement Narratives in Online Communities: The 2021 Cuban Protests on Reddit - Brian Keith (Virginia Tech), Tanushree Mitra (University of Washington) and Chris North
World Room [10] Contributed Papers: Automation
Using computational methods to automate tasks like tagging data, generating stories from data, uncovering leads and breathing new life into photo archives.
  1. Automated Text-Based Classification of Political Campaign Expenses - Dylan Freedman and Lenny Bronner (The Washington Post)
  2. Automated news generation based on structured data of Russian local election results - Pavel Lebedev (National Research University - Higher School of Economics)
  3. Designing and Deploying AI-Driven Lead Discovery Systems for Science Journalists - Sachita Nishal and Nicholas Diakopoulos (Northwestern University)
  4. Archeologies of Data in Contemporary Journalism: the digital afterlives of newspapers’ photo morgues - Giulia Taurino, Si Wu and David Smith (Northeastern University)
Brown Institute [11] Contributed Papers: Supporting Data Journalism
This is a slightly mixed session covering everything from open data projects to a look at newsroom 'Innovation Labs'.
  1. A multi-country computational analysis of press-state-online citizen relationship - Jean Dinco (UNSW)
  2. “Open Data, Open Code, Open Knowledge:” Making Public Intent Data More Accessible and Discoverable through Visualizations and Storytelling - Tony Fujs (World Bank Group)
  3. The Emergence of the Occupation of Data Journalist and its Implications for the Future of Computational Journalism - Keren Henderson, Stan Jastrzebski and Kevin Crowston (Syracuse University)
  4. Newsroom innovation labs as ‘survival entities’ for journalism? Mapping the process of institutionalization at The Washington Post - Hannes Cools, Baldwin Van Gorp and Michael Opgenhaffen (KU Leuven)
11:30AM - 12:50PM
Lecture Hall		 [12] Invited Session: Reconstructing the Built Environment
How reconstructions of the built environment lead to in-depth stories
  1. Reconstructing the Neighborhood Destroyed by the Tulsa Race Massacre - Anjali Singhvi (The New York Times)
  2. Forensic engineering and modeling the Surfside condo collapse - Sarah Blaskey, Ben Conarck, Aaron Leibowitz (Miami Herald) and Dawn Lehman (University of Washington)
12:50 - 1:50PM
Lecture Hall		 Lunch
1:50 - 3:10PM Paper Sessions
Lecture Hall [13] Contributed Papers: AI and the Newsroom
What challenges does AI pose for newsrooms? Here we look at technical approaches to ease adoption, ethical questions and a case study from China about the different legal standings of AI and journalism.
  1. Algorithms in the news: challenges and recommendations for an artificial intelligence with the ethical values of journalism - Patricia Ventura-Pocino (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
  2. Interactive Machine Teaching: Towards Accessible Machine Learning for News Media - Swati Mishra and Jeff Rzeszotarski (Cornell University)
  3. A practical approach for Developing Editorial Algorithms with Active Learning - Francesco Marconi, Eric Bolton and Erin Riglin (Applied XL)
  4. AI ≥ Journalism: How the Chinese Copyright Law protects tech giants’ AI innovations and disrupts the journalistic institution - Joanne Kuai, Raul Ferrer-Conill and Michael Karlsson (Karlstad University)
World Room [14] Contributed Papers: Stories II
These talks look at the structure of data visualizations and works data journalism, synthesizing strategies and cataloging approaches
  1. Analyzing News Frames: A Survey of Computational Approaches - Naeemul Hassan and Mohammad Ali (University of Maryland, College Park)
  2. A study on a face-embedded data visualization thumbnail of a news article - Joohee Kim and Sungahn Ko (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology)
  3. Familiarization and self-reflection strategies in interactive data visualizations - Olga Lopes (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
  4. Memory, Emotions and Heuristics: How brain functions can affect data journalism perception - Elina Makri (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)