Computing The News

Download or read book Computing the News written by Sylvain Parasie and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with a full-blown crisis, a growing number of journalists are engaging in seemingly unjournalistic practices such as creating and maintaining databases, handling algorithms, or designing online applications. “Data journalists” claim that these approaches help the profession demonstrate greater objectivity and fulfill its democratic mission. In their view, computational methods enable journalists to better inform their readers, more closely monitor those in power, and offer deeper analysis. In Computing the News, Sylvain Parasie examines how data journalists and news organizations have navigated the tensions between traditional journalistic values and new technologies. He traces the history of journalistic hopes for computing technology and contextualizes the surge of data journalism in the twenty-first century. By importing computational techniques and ways of knowing new to journalism, news organizations have come to depend on a broader array of human and nonhuman actors. Parasie draws on extensive fieldwork in the United States and France, including interviews with journalists and data scientists as well as a behind-the-scenes look at several acclaimed projects in both countries. Ultimately, he argues, fulfilling the promise of data journalism requires the renewal of journalistic standards and ethics. Offering an in-depth analysis of how computing has become part of the daily practices of journalists, this book proposes ways for journalism to evolve in order to serve democratic societies.

Download or read book Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism written by Hamid R. Ekbia and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of a new division of labor between machines and humans, in which people provide value to the economy with little or no compensation. The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what prompts people to participate in the process. Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.

Download or read book Once Upon an Algorithm written by Martin Erwig and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This easy-to-follow introduction to computer science reveals how familiar stories like Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter illustrate the concepts and everyday relevance of computing. Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm. Erwig illustrates a series of concepts in computing with examples from daily life and familiar stories. Hansel and Gretel, for example, execute an algorithm to get home from the forest. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates the problem of unsolvability; Sherlock Holmes manipulates data structures when solving a crime; the magic in Harry Potter’s world is understood through types and abstraction; and Indiana Jones demonstrates the complexity of searching. Along the way, Erwig also discusses representations and different ways to organize data; “intractable” problems; language, syntax, and ambiguity; control structures, loops, and the halting problem; different forms of recursion; and rules for finding errors in algorithms. This engaging book explains computation accessibly and shows its relevance to daily life. Something to think about next time we execute the algorithm of getting up in the morning.

Download or read book U-M Computing News written by and published by UM Libraries. This book was released on 1988 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines written by Chris Kempes and published by Seminar. This book was released on 2018-09 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do computers use so much energy? What are the fundamental physical laws governing the relationship between the precise computation run by a system, whether artificial or natural, and how much energy that computation requires? This volume integrates concepts from diverse fields, cultivating a modern, nonequilibrium thermodynamics of computation.

Download or read book Acting with Technology written by Victor Kaptelinin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-08-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic presentation of activity theory, its application to interaction design, and an argument for the development of activity theory as a basis for understanding how people interact with technology. Activity theory holds that the human mind is the product of our interaction with people and artifacts in the context of everyday activity. Acting with Technology makes the case for activity theory as a basis for understanding our relationship with technology. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi describe activity theory's principles, history, relationship to other theoretical approaches, and application to the analysis and design of technologies. The book provides the first systematic entry-level introduction to the major principles of activity theory. It describes the accumulating body of work in interaction design informed by activity theory, drawing on work from an international community of scholars and designers. Kaptelinin and Nardi examine the notion of the object of activity, describe its use in an empirical study, and discuss key debates in the development of activity theory. Finally, they outline current and future issues in activity theory, providing a comparative analysis of the theory and its leading theoretical competitors within interaction design: distributed cognition, actor-network theory, and phenomenologically inspired approaches.

Download or read book Computing and Change on Campus written by Sara Kiesler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987-09-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the authors examine the impact of computerization on faculty, staff, administrators, and students, and find that the new technology has social consequences - changes in patterns of attention, social contact, norms, and social structure.