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I’ll be teaching a guest lecture at Northeastern Journalism School today. In it, I’ll be walking through my data sonification project and how I approach new datasets. I’m posting the slides here, although they are a little minimalist, in case anyone is interested!

The data sonification I created was adopted by Joshua Clausen to create a composition called “Requiem.” The piece was performed by the Concordia College Choir in March 2018 and is currently on tour in seven states.

I interviewed Clausen about his inspirations on the World.

Listen to my interview with Clausen here. 🎧

Listen to an excerpt of “Requiem” in performance on Clausen’s site. 🎧

Download the score. 🎼

(The World)

New data analysis from the Smithsonian.com by Aleszu Bajak and Felippe Rodrigues looks at how performance-enhancing drugs like Piracetam, Modafinil, and Noopept are being discussed by techies. They’ve also open-sourced the R code that was used to find the story.

ARTICLE: What Reddit Can Tell Us About the Afterlives of Banned Olympic Drugs  📝

Buzzfeed just published a new story and database looking at what kinds of Twitter accounts are banned worldwide. Great work by Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, who also runs Data is Plural, a handy newsletter of interesting datasets.

ARTICLE: An Inside Look At The Accounts Twitter Has Censored In Countries Around The World 📝

DATA:  Google spreadsheet of 1,700+ banned accounts 📊 

DATA: Twitter's own removal request data by country 🐦

In the same week that a former Google engineer filed a lawsuit against the company claiming discrimination against conservatives and white men, the Pew Research Center released a new report stating that half of all women in STEM jobs have experienced discrimination at work. 

Meanwhile, the number of women receiving bachelor’s degrees in computer science has declined in the past decade — despite gains in other fields.

REPORT: “Women and Men in STEM Often at Odds Over Workplace Equity,” Pew Research Center. 📝

For the World’s special edition on global gun culture last Friday, I used data sonification to convey the death toll of a year of mass shootings in America.

Each note represents a day when a mass shooting occurred. The Gun Violence Archive, which has been tracking gun violence in America since 2013, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot and/or killed.

The volume of each note corresponds with how many people were killed. Shootings in which no one died are represented with the quietest note.

The loudest note is the Las Vegas shooting on Oct. 1, where 59 people died, the deadliest shooting in US history.

The last note is from Nov. 16, when a shooting in Columbus, Georgia, injured seven — the day before the episode aired.

Listen to the piece, with narration, below (sonification begins at 1:02):

And learn more by reading the article on PRI.org: How other countries can help us understand America's mass shooting crisis.

Special thanks to Mike Corey at Reveal News, who built the python MIDITime library I used to sonify the data.

Yesterday, a white male gunman killed at least 26 people at a church in Texas.

Today, America woke up to a flood of misinformation — on Twitter and even mainstream media.

(Source: Buzzfeed News)

Whenever a mass shooting or terrorist attack occurs, misinformation follows.

It’s not a surprise that users on Reddit and 4chan are able to game search engine and trending topic results. Politicians and journalists should always be prepared to second-guess and fact-check early reports of victims and perpetrators.

To help understand how that happens, here are five stories to read and people to follow:

READ: Here Is The Misinformation Going Around About The Texas Church Shooting 📝

Quick roundup of the rumors out there yesterday and today by Buzzfeed News — start here to make sure you’re aware of the rumors being spread.

FOLLOW: @CraigSilverman, Craig Silverman, Media Editor at Buzzfeed News, focuses on misinformation.

READ: Study finds fringe communities on Reddit and 4chan have high influence on flow of alternative news to Twitter 📝  

How does a fake news article circulated on 4chan end up as the top search result on Twitter? Phys.org article.

FOLLOW: @emilianoucl , Emiliano De Cristofaro, security researcher, University College London.

Bonus: the original paper, The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources 📊

READ: Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media Ecosystem 📊

A very thorough study of the current state of alternative and “fake” media by Kate Starbird.

FOLLOW: @KateStarbird, Kate Starbird, researcher,  crisis informatics and online rumors at University of Washington.

READ Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web 📊

The “fringe” Internet is fringe until it starts being a major influencer in national politics. If nothing — read for the title. By Hine, Gabriel Emile, et al.

FOLLOW: @gianluca_string, Gianluca Stringhini, researcher at University College London, studies 4chan, “how bad people act on the Internet.”

READ: The Virginia Shooter Wanted Fame. Let’s Not Give It to Him. 📝  

Article is from 2005, following the Virginia Tech shooting — but evergreen food for thought from Zeynep Tufekci.

Last week I was cooking dinner and listening to the NPR Code Switch Podcast’s great series on Ron Brown High School — “an all-boys public school designed for young men of color with a staff of mostly black men.” 

The school was born out of a need to give young black men teachers and role models who looked like them. Which made me wonder: Just how bad is teacher diversity in public high schools?

The answer? Pretty bad.

Last year, the US Department of Education released a report on diversity in public high schools.

They found that 82 percent of elementary and secondary school teachers are white. Not only that, but the proportion of teachers who were black slightly decreased between 1987 and 2012.

In contrast, the number of white students are expected to decrease to just under half of the population by 2024.

For more, read the report, linked below, and listen to the NPR Code Switch Podcast.

Sources:

The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce, US Dept. of Education, July 2016 📊

Episode 1: At Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, Students Are Kings, Not Kids  🎧

@revealnews​ from the Center for Investigative Reporting just published a kickass story on diversity statistics — and the lack thereof — from tech companies.

They also put out an interactive public database of which companies released their EEO-1 diversity reports — and which didn’t.

Hidden figures: How Silicon Valley keeps diversity data secret 📝

“Everything in the world is about food... except food is really about power.” 

— Not Oscar Wilde

Why does it matter when the New York Times “discovers” bubble tea? Takeout might be second thought on busy weeknights, but the way we think about food — especially Asian food — has deep cultural and economic impacts.

Below, a list of seven must-reads, watches, and listens to serve as appetizers in thinking about food, race, and power.

1) The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person 📝

Clarissa Wei from Vice breaks down why “othering” Chinese food is so harmful. This piece is a great introduction to the problem.

2) Food, Race, and Power: Who gets to be an authority on 'ethnic' cuisines? 📊

Lorraine Chuen from Intersectional Analyst scraped hundreds of recipes from the NYT Cooking website and found that “of the 263 entries under the 'Chinese’ recipe filter, almost 90% have White people listed as author in the byline.”  

Want to play with the data yourself? It’s all available in a Google spreadsheet. You know we ❤️ data here.

3)  What Happens When a Brown Chef Cooks White Food? 📝

Here’s a piece from Khushbu Shah of GQ that looks at discrimination and appropriation in the food industry.

4)  The Search for General Tso 📺

A documentary about the ubiquitous takeout dish by Jenny 8 Lee. Is it even really Chinese food?  

5) Pho is so much more than food 🎧

This episode of Second Wave podcast explores the origins of pho and what it means to Vietnamese identity in America.

6) Racist Sandwich, a podcast 🎧

I haven’t listened to this one yet, but I’ve heard it’s good. Description from Twitter bio: “The podcast about food, race, class, and gender. Hosted by chef @hooleil and journalist @zahirj. Produced by @juandr47.”

7) Sweet & Sour, a podcast 🎧

This one is a bonus — it isn’t specifically about issues of Asian food, but it’s got a foodie name. A podcast by sisters Katie Zhu and Nicole Zhu exploring different facets of Asian American culture.

8) Our Readers Call Us Out Over Bubble Tea. They Are Right. 📝

For good measure — this is how the New York Times apologized about their poorly-directed article. It’s not the first and won’t be the last slip-up. Editors, take note. 

Suggestions? Email [email protected] or tweet @dataloveblog.

Follow this list on Twitter for updates:

Evergreen reading list on Asian food, culture 🌲: https://t.co/o3sHh3lSJR @dearclarissa

— Sophie Chou (@mpetitchou)

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