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 [...]

This past summer I had the opportunity to be embedded in the newsroom of the Sacramento Bee as a AAAS Mass Media Fellow. The AAAS places a number of scientists and engineers at mass media outlets every summer to help promote the communication of science with the general public.
I got the chance to work with [...]

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 [...]

I ran across this round-up of some of the most prominent Political Fact Checking sites online including non-partisan FactCheck, Politifact, and  Washington Post Fact Checker Blog, as well as the partisan counter-parts: Newsbusters and MediaMatters. One of my criticisms of such sites is that oftentimes the fact-checking is decontextualized from the orginal document, especially for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Version 0.0.0.1 of Videolyzer is now online! Videolyzer is a tool designed for journalists and bloggers to be able to collaboratively assess the information quality of a video, including its transcript. Information quality involves things like credibility, validity, and comprehensivness among other things.  Videolyzer was designed to support the analysis, collection, and sharing of criticisms [...]

In The Elements of Journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel call it the “Awareness Instinct,” that basic human drive to know something about what’s going on beyond our direct experience. Sure, the gold standard for journalists is to give people the information they need to make the decisions that are important to themselves, their families, and their [...]