Dhrumil Mehta
Database Journalist, Politics @ FiveThirtyEight
Helo, my name is...
Dhrumil Mehta (he/him)
Associate Prof. of Journalism @ Columbia U.
Deputy Director of Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Visiting Associate Prof of Public Policy @ Harvard Kennedy School
dhrumil.mehta@columbia.edu
@datadhrumil
@dmil
Highlights:
Currently
-
Associate Prof. @ Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
-
Visiting Prof. @ Harvard Kennedy School
Previously
-
Database Journalist, Politics @ FiveThirtyEight
- Software Development Engineer @ Amazon
- Northwestern:
- BA in Philosophy + Minor in Cognitive Science
- MS in Computer Science
Data Journalism
Data-Driven Storytelling
Public Opinion and Polling
Media
Other stuff...
Interactive News
Data Scraping / Cleaning
Building Software
Bots
Internal Workflows
Bots
Reports Election Results
Bots
Lets readers see results that FiveThirtyEight deems unexpected
Expectations are calibrated before results ever start coming in.
"Research"
C+J Conference @ Stanford (2016)
Explaining Data
Open Data
https://www.datajournalismawards.org/project-listing/?project_id=2082
Machine Reading The News
My "research" agenda
How I'm Feeling
Imposter-y | what does "research" look like in journalism?
What I'm Seeking
- Possible collaborators / folks with aligned research interests who I should reach out to
- Feedback on the research agenda
- General advice...
- New friends...
Computationally analyzing text to better understand media and political environments.I have a research interest in text analysis
Data journalism:
"Quantitative social science...on deadline."
- Andrew Flowers (former 538 quantitative editor)
But the "on deadline" part can be tricky...
Which is partly why methodological innovation is so hard to do in newsrooms, and often the new and innovative methodologies are limited to large newsrooms with time and space to experiment or with the power to put resources behind large enterprise projects.
... and even then we're often leaning on the work of our colleagues.
It's hard for newsrooms to do this kind of work regularly without a template for it.
- There is only so much methodological innovation our editorial process can handle. The edit-burden for introducing a new methodology has to be justified by the importance or the story due to deadline / bandwidth constraints.
- There is an "uncanny valley" of stories that could push the envelope in terms of methodology that can't get done because they require more innovation than can be justified (the first time).
Journalism Schools are well-placed to pioneer methodological innovation.
- Co-location with academics of from disciplines makes taking inspiration from other disciplines easier
- It's exciting work for student projects (and makes for great portfolio pieces)!
- Students often spend several weeks on a project or two...there is room for iteration.
- J-schools are well placed to take knowledge from across newsrooms who are doing this kind of work, and consolidate / explain / democratize / "templatize" it for newsrooms.
The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico
The Media Really Started Paying Attention To Puerto Rico When Trump Did
Tracking Candidate Mentions
Increasing Sophistication
2017
2019
Now
Metrics with Fewer Assumptions
Adjective <--> Referent Pairs
LLMs
What I'm Seeking
- Folks with aligned research interests who I should reach out to
- Feedback on the research agenda / framing
- General advice...
- New friends...
Machine Reading The News
By Dhrumil Mehta
Machine Reading The News
Presenting my research agenda at Data Science Institute Faculty Meeting
