But here I’m going suggest something a bit different by setting up a spectrum of computational journalism artifacts along the dimension of content specificity. On one end you have the things I just talked about: tools that help journalists uncover stories and make sense of information. These tools are practically independent of any semantics associated with information but can be customized for different data types (e.g. geographic, time, network etc.). They’re also geared toward insight generation and designed for the kinds of work processes and tasks that journalists engage in on a daily basis.

On the other end of the spectrum there are computationally infused presentations of  stories. A computational journalist might use computation in such a story by making models or data interactive. For example one interactive graphic I worked on for SacBee.com is based on an evaporative water model together with scraped hourly Sacramento weather conditions. The goal was to paint a picture of the model and help people understand when best to water their lawns.

Another example comes from editorial simulations such as September 12^th. In that interactive, an editorial model describes the relationship between terrorists and anti-terrorist bombing in the Middle East. But while the model and mechanic are of course described abstractly, the semantics of the graphics and interactions are what is essential to the presentation.

Content specific presentations rely heavily on the semantics of the information to convey meaning. Rather than being generic information tools, they intertwine computation with the story itself. Interaction, information, and visual design become essential to communicating a semantically laden model. And in comparison to generic tools, content specific CJ needs to be designed with a “reader” in mind; to disseminate insights (or opinions) with the public in mind.

There’s value to both kinds of computational journalism: tools to help uncover stories and develop models, and specific presentations to effectively communicate those models.

I got the chance to work with a number of different people at the Sac Bee on both traditional science reporting and writing as well as some interactive features that added computational methods such as games and information graphics to the storytelling mix.

Once I got the hang of it the writing itself became a lot of fun: collect some background reference material, meet and talk to scientists and other stakeholders, ask some questions and put it all together in some kind of storyline.  Here are a few of the pieces I wrote for the paper:

• Researchers press olive oil for its benefit secrets
• For seniors, a Wii may be a win-win: Fun and brain-nourishing
• Mechanical Turk lets your make a few bucks online

News people seem to have a curious affection for trivia games. When I suggested that I could do some interactive media like games, the trivia quiz seemed to be natural fit. I did three different straight-up trivia games:

• Are you ready to be a celebrity? 
• How good are you at counting calories?
• How well do you know your mascots?

Trivia games can be fun because they can span different media (e.g. photos and names) and different data types (e.g. free text, multiple choice, numbers / scales etc.) and people can learn as they play along. In all three trivia games I added some kind of feedback for self-evaluation. In the mascots guessing game there was also some time pressure so that it would keep things moving along.

I also got to do some interactive information graphics for the Sac Bee:

In the mass layoffs graphic the goal was to depict the data from mass layoff events in California on a map to show where the layoff hotspots were. You can animate through the map month by month to see when the worst layoffs occurred and in what cities. You can also click on a city and see the cumulative layoffs for that city.

In the California stimulus map, we visualized the federal stimulus money coming to California on a county by county basis. Our hope was to highlight how the money was being spent and which counties were receiving the largest allocations. The data will continue to be updated, expanded, and cleaned so it’s an evolving artifact. In a slightly different take on the stimulus, I created a stimulus trivia game, which had the user trying to answer trivia questions based on their interaction with the graphic. My goal was to draw the user into the story and trace a path through the data space to expose them to different facets and perhaps some interesting outliers as they used the graphic. You can see a write-up and analysis of the piece from some folks at Georgia Tech here.

Finally, I spent a lot of time over the summer working on a lawn watering calculator, the goal of which was to visualize some models about evaporative loss from sprinkler systems together with local Sacramento weather statistics on an hour by hour basis. Since things like solar radiation, temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed affect the amount of water lost in the air during watering we wanted people to be able to see when the best time of day would be to water their lawns if they wanted to conserve water. It turns out that watering in the evening may not be the best idea since air temperatures are often still high and the Delta breeze is cranked up in the valley.

In their 2004 textbook, Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul write, “Informal sources include observations about audiences, messages, and the environment in which the communicator operates, as well as networks of supervisors, colleages, clients, neighbors, and friends the communicator deals with every day.”

We would posit that news games (or other forms of interactive multimedia) could function as a valuable addition to the journalist’s toolbelt of information gathering capabilities if they were properly intrumented to gather observations of user behavior. Case in point is American Public Media’s Budget Game, a complex simulation asking users to manage the US federal budget by selecting different policy options ranging from taxation to defense and the environment. In the process of play, the game elicits a set of policy priorities from the user, leading to an understanding of the depth, complexity, and tradeoffs of remaining true to your ideological beliefs while also maintaining a realistic air. After decisions are made, the budget is simulated out to 2028  and you get a sense for the impacts of your decisions over time. You can also see how many other people played the same sets of decisions as you did and if you input some basic demographic data you can even start comparing your decisions to others.

The implications of the APM Budget Game as a journalistic tool, an informal sources, are interesting. On the backend, we can imagine a journalist looking at the aggregate decision data taken from players of the game and looking for trends or correlations between sets of decisions. Do 80% of players decide to roll back Bush’s tax breaks? Are those same players in a middle income tax bracket? Also, what is the ordering of the decisions made in the game? Perhaps this could lead to some insights into how players view the importance of some of the issues at stake. Interesting trend or correlation? The journalist can capitalize on it and write a follow-up story.

It’s well known that online journalism operations (e.g. the NY Times) have analytics departments that do data-mining on pages to understand both demographics and how users flow through news pages. But what about an interactives-analytics group that data-mines on the logged behavioral response to games and other interactive graphics? This type of mentality could also lead to different types of game designs since the goal would be both the user experience as well as the “exhaust”, the data that could be collected, from that user experience. How to design such an interactive experience that also produces something interesting for the reseacher / journalist?

Clearly games as informal sources are not going to replace other forms of sources for journalists. Interviews of scholars or reliance on institutional reports produce different types of insights compared to the observation of online behavior. But this could be yet another way to probe at the audience and understand what is most relevant to them.

I started by reviewing “The Sociology of News” written by Michael Schudon, a sociologist at UCSD. If you haven’t read this book I would recommend it, not only for its concise definitions of terms like “news” and “journalism,” but also for its in depth description of the American culture of journalism.

Schudson claims that one of the distortions in the news that arises out of its culture is that it is “event-centered, action centered, and person-centered.” Event emphasis, for better or worse, is a characteristic I think most of us would agree predominates the news. Here’s where games can provide something more: process-oriented journalism. For instance, how does the process of the electoral college work? The news industry has often failed to provided process-oriented reporting, but games are perfectly suited to process explication. At the same time, Schudson writes, “When things are going well there seems less of a reason for a news story. The news instinct is triggered by things going badly.” Is process just boring? And if so, how can games make process more engaging for consumers? Perhaps the unusual and the “bad” news needs to be incorporated into process games.

On the other hand, perhaps what people want to know from the news isn’t process and that’s why it’s not prevalent. The brutal truth is that a majority of the useful information in the news consists of things like movie listings, restaurant reviews, weather forecasts, and local sales advertisements. This extends to “news you can use,” like reports about your health and financial investments. These are the topics and types of information that are “important” to people on a daily basis, for which they need a guide.  There’s a whole interesting story to tell here about the history of news and its evolution. Politics didn’t really enter into the news equation until the rise of democracies. The News was appropriated by those seeking democracy in the 18th century, and in the course of time journalism has maintained its rhetoric as the machinery that makes democracy work. But perhaps the bias that “serious” journalism needs to be about politics or public policy is unfounded and was socially constructed in a distant time. All I’m saying here is that games have a chance to go back to basics and give people what they want: the information they (really) need presented in a compelling format.

But whether or not journalists will accept games into their repertoire for telling stories is questionable. Technical and literacy issues aside, there is cultural conflict between journalism and games: News has a “prestige” aura around it. The prestige of the news organization legitimates certain forms of knowledge and amplifies stories. It provides a certification of importance. Just think back to the time when you made “the news” and were in the local paper. Somehow that paper had conferred on you an air of importance. Games may lack this prestige value because of their association with frivolity, playfulness, and general unproductivity. To break this cultural standoff would take leading news organizations accepting games into their news culture and framing them with the same aura of prestige conferred on other media.

The final point I want to make here builds off of Schudon’s observation that oftentimes a journalist’s aim in telling a story is astonishment and moral outrage rather than any deep understanding; the so called “Holy Shit!” stories that make milk come out of your nose at the breakfast table. This may also be an area where games can excel. Sure, images and videos can shock you, but what about a game that puts the player in an uncomfortable situation where their own actions shock them. I’m reminded of the PETA parody of Cooking Mama, where the player had to do all sorts of inhumane things to a Tukey in order to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table. If attention getting is part of the news culture it seems like a no-brainer that games can do this every bit as well as other media, maybe even better, albeit with perhaps more of a time investment on the part of the player.

Specific Why of State. This is a precise explanation for a game element’s attributes including any relationships, the directionality of those relationships, and their valences.

Sim City 4 does this exceedingly well but using a “?” tool which when clicked on an element exposes the state of the attributes of that object relevant to game play. For instance, it will tell you the crime rate and freight trip length for industrial buildings. At any point in the game you get a snapshot of the status of an individual object. Another method used to expose state is by hovering the mouse over an object. This reveals less information than the “?” click, but still shows you “the top three conditions that currently have the most dramatic impact on the desirability of the area” [Sim City 4 manual]. When the state of elements is spatially structured as in a map, overlays are used to show the distribution of a variable across space. Graphs are used to show transparency of state over time, thus aggregations of individual elements’ state are shown as a time series. Sim City 4 manages to achieve a playable simulation in part because the information that is necessary for optimizing the simulation is transparent in the interface. This is done through hovering popups, clickable popups, spatially layered attributes, and temporally graphed attributes.

Another game I looked at, Oil God, adds an additional twist to communicating state transparency by adding an overlay network visual on top of a spatial layout to explicitly show relationships between game elements. Democracy 2 encodes two more variables into its graphical overlays: relationship valence (via red-green coloring) and directionality (via animation direction). Another perhaps simpler method for communicating specific state information is via textual feedback. For instance, in The Garbage Game, where the premise is to keep as much refuse out of landfills, I made a decision in the game to refill and reuse my plastic bottle and it told me: “We figure that a bottle will get refilled about three times on average, so we’ve reduced the volume of water bottle waste in your sorted recycling to 25 percent of the 17,677 tons that New Yorkers currently generate each year, or 4,420 tons.”

Specific Why of State Change. This relates to explicit descriptions of computational state and explanations of why a state has changed. What was the trigger, event, or decision that affected a state change? Was this trigger algorithmic or based on user input? This facet of mechanical transparency is lacking in many of the games I looked at. One game that did have some attempt at an explanation for state change is Energville. At the end of the game, a graph shows the economic, environmental, and security impacts of your decisions. Along the timeline of the graph there are icons of different events that have happened. Clicking on these expands them out with additional textual information. For instance, “2014: wind power fails to deliver. -resulting in a 20% increase in your Wind economic impact.” Since state change is a matter of an attribute over time, annotated graphs and timelines seem to be a natural interface metaphor for explaining state change. Another candidate would be animation. For embedding monikers about state change within an interface itself, something like the afterglow effects in Phosphor might also work.

General Why of State. This is a generic explanation for an element’s attribute or a relationship between attributes, which is not related to the specifics of any particular element.

General why of state involves explication of the existence and valence of a relationship rather than the actual mathematical description, which would be included in the specific why of state. Because the explanation is general in terms of being non-specific, external information and sources can be used to buttress the existence and valence of relationships in the model. One of the tensions that this general information brings up is the granularity of its availability. Is it embedded in the interface or simply available as blocks of text elsewhere? What we see in many games is that the general why of state is offloaded to textual explanation on a separate information page, sometimes also outside of the interactive application itself. In Energyville, which has players managing economic, environmental, and security impacts of energy decisions, each of these facets has explanations in plain text. For instance, the environmental facet, when clicked, lists out all the negative impacts on the environment and cites the names of some recent reports which were used to “inform the impact assessments.”

Sim City 4 and Democracy 2 follow a similar strategy of explaining in text generally what the relationships are between variables of interest. For instance, In Sim City 4, clicking a city opinion poll about land value tells you this: “Represents the average land value in your city. To raise land value place parks, schools, hospitals, and other amenities in your residential zones.” In Democracy 2, the textual information comes in the form of “Encyclopedia” articles, which explain and provide context for the variable currently under consideration. The advantage to a textual approach is that we have well understood conventions for citing information in text. Also, it’s unclear whether or not an abstract relationship could be represented well either in an image or in video material. The value of such multimedia assets may however serve as existence proof for some attribute of interest, if such an attribute is not already obvious.

• Decisions. Explaining how and why relevant editorial decisions are made. This includes explaining any inclusion or exclusion criteria for any controversial decisions as well as explaining why a decision to anonymize a source was made. Selection is at the heart of bias, so to be more transparent about bias, journalists should always support their decisions about selecting or excluding information.

• Lack or Uncertainty of Knowledge. Being upfront about acknowledging what questions stories do not answer (or cannot answer). When information is uncertain or unavailable, what assumptions have been made which affect interpretation?

• Production Process. Providing evidentiary support to a story. News providers can use the Internet to provide primary source material in the form of databases, documents, methodologies, or audio and video of interviews. This can also include information about the nature and quality of the source used for information gathering. For instance, was the source of information a press conference, interview, press release, or quote from another media institution? What is the context and circumstance under which that information was gathered? Why is that source qualified to comment on the issue at hand?  If multiple sources were used, how were they selected? At a different level of granularity process can also involve explaining to the audience how stories are developed, reported, edited, produced, and presented. In Ian’s terminology highly granular process transparency corresponds to the transparency of reference and at a less granular level to the transparency of construction.

• Labeling. Advertisement and opinion needs to be marked as such to avoid confusion by news consumers.

• Correction. Admitting and correcting mistakes and errors in a timely fashion.

Transparency is modulated by features such as:

• Granularity. What is the appropriate scale to address transparency? Sometimes it is addressed at the level of the whole newsroom in the form of an editor’s column or blog about how decisions are made. Other times it should be addressed with more specificity, at the level of providing links to primary source material as well as providing context about the information sources in a particular story.

• Degree. Even in a highly granular instantiation of transparency, not every statement likely needs that much attention to detail. Perhaps there are culturally accepted chunks of information that don’t need explicit citation, or are so widely known as to be considered wasting space if they are included. No one should expect that an article contain a complete list of explanations regarding sourcing or newsgathering, as this would be overwhelming for a consumer and perhaps impossible in print or video where space and time are at a premium.

Ultimately though the granularity and degree of transparency need to be audience centric. “What does my audience need to know to evaluate this information for itself? This includes explaining as much as is practical about how the news organization got its information.” (The Elements of Journalism. 94)

When considering bloggers-as-journalists the concept of transparency shifts a bit. Whereas the predominant notion of the journalist as objective and impartial reporter prevails in mainstream media, bloggers participating in journalistic activity tend to be transparent about their bias and background as well as what they have at stake. Bloggers have the freedom to express transparency in motives as well as transparency in process. For instance, bloggers often link to documents, sources and supporting evidence to buttress their own authority whereas oftentimes press articles are written without links, as if for print.

In a future post I will mix and match this understanding of transparency in journalism with the notions of mechanical transparency and system transparency I’ve talked about before.

While the state of the system is central to the notion of system transparency, what we’re really interested in is an idealization of the system state. What’s important in a user-centric model is the representation of “state required to account for the future external behavior.” In the text Dix refers to this as the “effect” which I think is nasty terminology. I’m going to call it the “User-Relevant State” or URS.

They do arrive at a workable definition of state: “[Transparency] would say that there is nothing in the state of the system that cannot be inferred from the display. If there are any modes, then these must have a visual indication; if there are any differences in behavior between the displayed shapes, then there must be some corresponding visual difference.” This gets at the central usability heuristic of observability and its relation to transparency. Observable states are visually shown in the interface; an invisible component of the URS does not uphold the principle of system transparency. One could make an argument that if the URS is not fully transparent usability problems are likely to ensue since the user does not have adequate feedback on the state of the system relevant to its usage.

Of course, not all of the URS may be observable in one view because of screen real-estate problems and that the display could be unintelligible if there were too much shown. Thus the URS can be progressively observed through interaction (e.g. clicking a marker and an object for state or displaying a layer over objects which explicates state). The usability of a system and its effectiveness may however be increased if more of the URS (such as data dimensions in a model) is visible in the display in one view. A key connection Dix makes is that when the user can observe the complete state of the system they can (in theory) predict what the system will do. This is precisely what many simulation games are all about: predicting how actions taken on the model will impact on future states of the simulation. The question remains: does complete transparency make a game experience too easy? Isn’t there some satisfaction in figuring it out?

Storytelling is one way to take information and make it interesting, relevant, and engaging to an audience. A way to make the significant matter to people. A way to raise awareness for a deeper issue by telling a good story. Another approach is to take raw data or information and to make it engaging through interaction. Games, information visualization, and other interactive data driven applications fit into this latter area. In this sense, the journalism of awareness can fully embrace new media as a vector for raising awareness for issues in the news, even if this new media falls short of that gold standard of journalism.

Here are some examples of what I mean by the Journalism of Awareness:

Online news quizzes of the sort found on facebook, for one, serve to raise awareness for news information. I think the quiz mechanic gets lambasted undeservingly for being “too simple” or “not interactive.” It’s raising awareness for news information without getting deep. That’s OK. If you get something wrong, you were still exposed to the quiz question and have a chance to go back afterwards and read the original news item if you care to. The downside is, if you’re not interested in news to begin with chances are you won’t go out of your way to try and complete a news quiz. The other downside is that someone has to sit there and write the questions and answers for these news quizzes: there’s a non-zero authoring cost.

Information visualization of the sort featured on Digg Labs is also a form of the journalism of awareness. These visualizations are dynamic and packed with information, but certainly don’t help you connect any dots. They’re there to provide an entry point to the information space, something that looks fun and visual to draw you in with enough of a snippet to get you interested in digging in. The upside here is that no authoring is necessary; Digg grabs the headline and first few sentences of the story as a summary automatically. There are LOTS of examples of calm, “ambient” visualizations which leave information scent in an environment to raise awareness.

Perhaps most promising for the journalism of awareness are those interactive games or applications that remediate already authored news content. This is because this opens up new avenues for engaging consumers and raising awareness for news using existing content. So for example we have the games featured on MSNBC’s NewsWare Site. While simple instantiations of classic arcade games, NewsBlaster and NewsBreaker use RSS news feeds to exposed the player of the game to pertinent headlines in the course of play. Another example of this is my own game, Audio Puzzler, a puzzle game which is played with short (~1 min) video snippets found online. The game is actually content agnostic, but when fed with news content such as video podcasts, it exposes people to the entire news video snippet in the course of solving the puzzle. These types of applications have the added benefit of engaging people who might not have otherwise been exposed to the information. This is in comparison to the quiz or info viz examples which presuppose an initial interest by the user. Perhaps in the course of playing, awareness is raised and questions spawned. That can help feed the awareness instinct and is perhaps a first step in getting people to actively engage the news.