In this seminar you will gain an overview of computational journalism as both a practice and as a field of academic research. Focusing on the sub-field of ‘automated journalism’, you will gain some hands-on experience with an automated journalism platform and become familiar with the academic literature on the topic. One theme of the research on automated journalism is about how it is perceived, for example in comparison to non-automated journalism. You will take up this theme for the empirical project. You will become familiar with, and critique, existing research on the perception of automated text journalism. Using transcripts from recent focus groups with news consumers, and a comprehensive set of examples of automated journalism (and human-written equivalents). you will design and pre-test a survey experiment to determine the ‘quality’ of automated news texts.
- Teacher: Sina Thäsler-Kordonouri
- Teacher: Neil Thurman