Rahul Bhargava

csv,conf,v9 csv,conf is a community event for data makers from all around the world! More info at csvconf.com

@csvconf.bsky.social reg now open! Sept 8-11 in Bologna 🇮🇹 I attended my first csv,conf last year, blown away by the welcoming community of journalists, designers, scientists, activists, and more. Excited to keynote on the close-to-my-heart theme: "community data"
www.eventbrite.com/e/csvconfv9-...

Join us in celebrating the 5th anniversary of the amazing Data Against Feminicide project 🎉 Including official launch of the Swahili version of our tools, co-designed with Femicide Count - Kenya. calendar 📅 Aug 14 🌍 11AM EDT | 12PM ARG/BRA | 3PM BST | 6PM EAT.
mit.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Meet Eva, the AI chatbot based on a woman in prison “Eva” is based on in-depth interviews with a woman in prison for drug trafficking and organized crime.

The Acosta "AI persona" interview is a gimmick, but that doesn't mean journalists should ignore the idea of AI simulacrums. @elsurti.com 🇵🇦 offered a more thoughtful example last year with their chatbot based on interviews with women in prison. restofworld.org/2025/paragua...

Submissions – COMPUTATION+JOURNALISM 2025 Symposium '+jQuery("").text(title).html()+'

Computation + Journalism this year in Miami in Dec 🎉 CFP is open for workshops, talks, short papers, and sessions. Always a great mix of academics and industry folks. Hope to see you there. Deadline Sept 7. cplusj2025.com/submissions/

Participatory Design Conference (PDC) coming in 2026 in Milan. I attended years ago and found it inspiring and welcoming. Exploratory paper deadline in Oct. Theme of "Peace, Dialogue, and Coexistence". www.pdc2026.polimi.it

Press Forward invests $22.7 million in local news infrastructure Press Forward is announcing investments of $22.7 million in 22 projects that will strengthen the infrastructure of the field. Today’s local newsrooms are much smaller than 25 years ago – doing more…

Congrats to the Press Forward Infrastructure award winners 👏🏽 We didn't make the cut this round, but appreciate the wonderful mix of funded projects that build networks, support journalists, and work on nuts & bolts. www.pressforward.news/infrastructu...

Faculty Support of George Mason’s President Draws Federal Investigation

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ.
The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

Announcing the 2024 Winners! We’re thrilled to unveil the winners of the 2024 Information is Beautiful Awards. This year’s entries pushed the boundaries of what data visualization can achieve—telling powerful stories,…

Go get inspired by the winners of this year's Information is Beautiful awards
www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/news/680-ann...
@infobeautiful.bsky.social @datavizsociety.bsky.social

line chart showing stories per week at a stable average of 300,000 for 2019 data

line chart showing stories per day with data starting from late June 2018 through the end of the year

Quick @mediacloud.bsky.social data re-ingestion update: 2019 data now available 🎉 We're about hallway through reprocessing historical data from 2018.

Excited to be speaking for this year's @umassamherst.bsky.social Data Science for the Common Good cohort tomorrow. Ready to engage on questions of who gets to define "good" and design approaches for *contested* "good"s. ds.cs.umass.edu/programs/ds4cg

streamgraph chart over time with one series per university

Do online news mentions in the far right predict or respond to Trump regime attacks on university presidents? Poking around with some @mediacloud.bsky.social data this week. This chart shows top 25 colleges mentioned since Jan, via entity extraction and heuristic name linking.

My office door keeps swinging closed. Old building, crooked walls 🤷🏽‍♂️
So I made a doorstop from my mosaicist wife's leftover supplies 🎉
Problem solved 👍🏽

Great @mediacloud.bsky.social use by the ever-talented @kendrawrites.com (for FAIR), looking at prevalence of Cuomo in news overage vs. other primary candidates.
fair.org/home/cuckoo-...

COMPUTATION+JOURNALISM 2025 Symposium – Data Journalism Under Autocracy • UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI, Coral Gables, FL | 12/11+12 '+jQuery("").text(title).html()+'

Computation + Journalism 2025 call is live 🎉 In Miami Dec 11+12. Open to any in-progress work related to the theme of data journalism under autocracy (or other topics). Deadline 8/31. Journalists, academics, researchers, all welcome to submit. cplusj2025.com

How The New York Times is (still) getting gamed by the right And blowing its credibility in the process.

I specifically teach my students about how the US far right targets mainstream news sources for amplification. I want them to recognize when they're getting played. Got a new case study 🤦🏽‍♂️
"the Times is enthusiastically destroying its credibility all by itself" www.theverge.com/culture/7000...

Summer AI + journalism updates: how automation is reshaping news routines - Storybench As the spring turns to summer, the intersection of AI and journalism is marked by fresh experiments and deepening debates over the future of storytelling. Here's a look at where things stand now.…

Our latest Storybench round-up of AI & Journalism news has dropped: www.storybench.org/summer-ai-jo...

Nestled up against the steps of City Hall in LA is a large placard with missing posters for the recently disappeared in the city.

Important changes are coming to Glitch We’ve got an important update for the Glitch community today: We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch.

bye bye @glitch.com 👋🏽😢 It was one of best sites making the web weird & fun again, and I used it a *ton* in my teaching. Sorry to see it go.
blog.glitch.com/post/changes...

Map of MA with municipality outlines. Some include a blue dot, indicating that at least one arrest by ICE has happened there. Include two annotations, for Milford (Marcelo Gomes da Silva) and Somerville (Rümeysa Öztürk) arrests.

Been diving into ICE-related arrest data for a few reasons lately. Scope is massive in MA. Mapping this is hard. Love to see @bostonglobe.com tracking & verifying arrests 👏🏽 Hope they share as a resource. This @johnhancock.bsky.social map helps, but I think would work better as a 2-color choropleth?

Screenshot from web stat dashboard showing: "Total Stories: 1,000,424,869. The Online News Archive holds news articles from around the globe. The system fetches and stories article text, and related metadata, every day. This is a psuedo-realtime system, allowing you to search content as recently as yesterday."

Another @mediacloud.bsky.social update today -- our reindexing of historical data into the new archive has caught up to our billionth story! Expect total to be around 2 billion once we finish reprocessing all our historical data. At 2019 now, working back to the first data we have, from early 2010s.

Honored to have a review of "Community Data" in @jmcquarterly.bsky.social! 😊
"The book’s integration of theoretical, methodological, and practical explication makes it an imperative resource for scholars and practitioners alike"

As a Brown man who grew up with a family who all eat like this, I can't tell you how deeply this hurts and genuinely cuts. The racism is unbelievable. I eat like this and am proud to do so but it doesn't stop how painful the shock is that someone views you this way.

Screenshot showing web stat dashboard: "Query Time: 0.844 Seconds. The time to return for a sample query running against the MediaCloud API. The latest timed query occurred at 2025-06-30 13:20"

Lots of @mediacloud.bsky.social updated this week 🎉 First, our new sever cluster is online! Our main ElasticSearch archive of online news stories is now running on a pool of 8 servers. Average queries running around 5 times faster! 🐌⃯⃯ ➡️🐆 search.mediacloud.org

Jordan then sent a letter reminding Stanford it was still under subpoena.

I started reading up on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Connect UVA, Columbia, Harvard to what began last year. Capitulation doesn’t work against an authoritarian machine.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/proc...

My chart on the history of three infectious diseases — smallpox, polio, and measles — before and after a vaccine was available.

This is a violation of the Constitution that is risking innocent lives.

We do not need another deadly, endless war.

Congress must act immediately to rein in Trump.

I'm helping the *input visualization* workshop at IEEE Vis this year: "visual representations that are designed to collect (and represent) new data rather than encode preexisting datasets". Send in your examples or position papers by Aug 4. inputvisualization.github.io/vis2025/

Navigating Personal Risk: Actions for Scholars PERSONAL RISK ENTRY POINT ACTIONS Risk- Independent Pursue your personal and collective well-being Minimize legal attack surfaces Understand digital attack vectors Enhance IT and physical security Use precise language Beware of pluralistic ignorance and false consensus effects Beware of culture change Beware of entrapment Be prepared Commit to facts and truth Democracy Low Engage with media Engage with your representative Engage with the public Reach out to children and young people Work for the longer term Autocracy Medium Help others cope with shock and fear Support imperilled research Protect imperiled research participants Safeguard data High Introduce friction Engage with people around you Gauge administrators’ resistance and seek to inoculate them Practice small acts of defiance Extreme Tell your story (including anonymously) Seek support from colleagues Seek wiggle

Core to our approach is that people's personal risk differs considerably -- a senior white male professor with tenure is more secure than a visiting scholar from the majority world, for example. Hence we structure possible actions around a personal risk assessment: 7/12

screenshot of Jupyter notebook showing python code use of the `story_sample` endpoint being used, with a table a results

Tool update: ‪@mediacloud.bsky.social‬ API now supports a `story_sample` endpoint, making it easy to pull a random sample of up to 1,000 stories matching your query from our free online news archive 🎉 I added a sample to our tutorial notebooks: github.com/mediacloud/a...

Pizza activity spikes just before reports of Israel attacking Iran The Pentagon Pizza Report tracks pizza place activity near the Pentagon. From the Guardian: The timing of Israel’s plan to attack Iran was top-secret. But Washington pizza delivery trackers guessed…

A timely one just as quirky: the Pentagon Pizza Report uses Google "busy-ness" charts to predict destabilizing global events
flowingdata.com/2025/06/16/p...