Computational Journalism was initially conceived of as an application of computing technologies to enable journalism across information tasks such as information gathering, organization and sensemaking, storytelling, and dissemination. But computing and algorithms can also become the object of journalism. Algorithms adjudicate a large array of decisions in our lives: not just search engines and personalized online news systems, but educational evaluations, markets and political campaigns, and the management of social services like welfare and public safety. A new form of computational journalism that I call “Algorithmic Accountability Reporting” is emerging to apply the core journalistic functions of watchdogging and accountability reporting to algorithms. In this talk I will provide some perspective on the tool-oriented roots of computational journalism, and then discuss how algorithmic accountability reporting is emerging as a mechanism for elucidating and articulating the power structures, biases, and influences that computational artifacts play in society.
Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism. His research is in computational and data journalism with an emphasis on algorithmic accountability, narrative data visualization, and social computing in the news. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he co-founded the program in Computational Journalism. Before UMD he worked as a researcher at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and CUNY studying the intersections of information science, innovation, and journalism. Nick can be contacted via email at nad@umd.edu, and is online at @ndiakopoulos and http://www.nickdiakopoulos.com.