Nick Diakopoulos

Much of my prior work in the field computational journalism has focused on building tools that could either be used by journalists or readers in their respective capacities as information producers or consumers.  And the recent Duke CJ Report heavily emphasized the role of computation in informing discovery tools to help journalists uncover new stories [...]

There are just two countries in the world where Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) advertising is allowed for pharmaceuticals: the US and New Zealand. The ostensible motivation? To educate consumers, to raise awareness of medical conditions, to get people talking to their doctors, or to reduce the stigma associated with certain conditions (e.g. Viagra)
Since the laws changed back [...]

How are people interacting in news games? What kinds of decisions are they making? And what game elements and relationships are players most interested in? These are the types of questions that an observant journalist might answer, or at least pose, if they began to think of games as informal sources of information.
In their 2004 [...]

Games and Journalism both evoke their own cultural images; the Ramen and Dorito stained gamer on one hand and the hard nosed, gum shoe journalist on the other. It’s not immediately obvious that oil and water can mix, nor am I going to argue that they should. But there are some interesting opportunities here, both [...]

Games are a decent starting point for seeing how mechanical transparency is addressed in computer interfaces since many times simulation games are built around the concept of optimizing some state of the game (resource use, growth, or simply just score etc.) based on decisions the player makes. Here I illustrate how games are approaching some [...]

In this post I’ll continue trying to glean knowledge from the study of transparency of interactive systems in HCI, which I began in an earlier post.
Back in the mid 1990’s there was a flurry of activity in HCI in trying to understand the explainability and transparency of interactive systems. Paul Dourish published extensively in the [...]

I’ve been trying to get a handle on how interactive software such as games can be made more transparent, and perhaps more trustworthy. As suggested in The Elements of Journalism, transparency signals a respect for the audience and reaffirms a journalist’s public interest motive, the key to gaining credibility. “The willingness of the journalist to [...]

I’ve gone back to basics and have been reading through the HCI bible (Human Computer Interaction 3rd Ed. Dix et al.) to get a better understand how transparency is conceived of in interactive systems. System transparency does get a treatment as an element of formal interface modeling. There are several key points that we can [...]

In Ian’s prior post on transparency and games he mentions three types of transparency: transparency of influence, transparency of construction, and transparency of reference. Cutting across these facets of transparency I’d like to add the transparency of mechanics which is particularly applicable to any consumer-facing journalistic software, of which games are one instance. To get [...]

The NYT has recently been doing a lot of interactive pieces for the 2008 presidential election. One of these is an interactive chart presentation of different political polls done by different organizations. This isn’t quite game-y, though it could be if there were some additional features like being able to compare one poll to another, [...]