Assignment # 3- Transparency Critique
Out: March 27, 2017
Due: April 10, 2017 (10am, before class begins)
Overview
The goal of this assignment is to develop and practice a critical stance towards computational and data journalism, specifically with respect to how transparency is exercised. You will select a piece of computational journalism from a list of provided articles and write a ~1000 word critique.
Getting Started
Transparency is one way in which journalists provide for media accountability: by showing their work it allows others to assess, critique, or extend that work. Ideally this makes journalists more careful about their work, and provides an extra avenue for an interested reader to evaluate whether they believe the claims made by a journalist.
This assignment asks you to select a piece of computational journalism from a provided list and critique the transparency-related disclosures around that project. You should read and consider the framework presented in this paper in helping to outline the types of factors that you might expect to see in a transparency disclosure. What aspects of data, model, inference, and interface were or were not transparent in the project? How was the transparency information presented? What are the implications to users or other stakeholders of information that may be included or lacking in the transparency disclosure?
Be sure to consider mediating factors in your critique of the transparency information: if you argue that a particular piece of information should have been disclosed but wasn't, why might that be? You might consider factors like cost, time and effort, privacy issues, potential for manipulation, legal implications of disclosure, how the disclosure would affect competitive advantage or trade secrets, or other factors that you argue are relevant.
Also reflect a bit and talk about whether the transparency information provided by the project was easy to access, easy to understand, and substantively impacted your trust in the piece. In any of your critical evaluations you might also consider what might be done to improve the transparency disclosures for the project: what advice would you give to the authors of the project to make the transparency of the project more effective?
Write your analysis as if you were going to post it to Medium and have other data journalists reading it: in other words, write for your peers. Be specific with examples and evidence to back up your critique. Make sure to consider the original article, any methods article, as well as Github repository in your analysis.
You should choose one of the following pieces to serve as the object of your critique.
- Machine Bias. ProPublic. Article, Methods, Github repo
- LAPD underreported serious assaults, skewing crime stats for 8 years. LA Times. Article, Repo
- The Tennis Racket. BuzzFeed News. Article, Methods 1, Methods 2, Code
Submission
This is an individual assignment and you may NOT work in groups. All work should be your own: if you happen to find other critical analyses of the piece online be sure to cite and do not plagiarize. Any sources cited should be either linked in the text of your write-up or included in a "references" section at the end.
You will be evaluated based on the clarity of your write-up (easy to follow, accurate), whether you include a diverse range of critical considerations about transparency, and how you rationalize your analysis using logic and evidence (citations, links, assumptions, limitations).
Your should submit your write-up of ~1000 words (excessively short or long write-ups will be penalized).
Mail a PDF (filename of ASGN3_<your lastname>.pdf) of your write-up to Professor Diakopoulos: nad@umd.edu by the due date.