November 23, Monday, 2015

Around 18 students along with Dr. Roselyn Du and project assistant Zhang Tianyi, went to Intium Media for a visit to their office at Querry Bay, Hong Kong.

Hu Pili, Data Scientist @ Intium Media, also Director of Intium Lab and Chao Tianyi, Researcher @ Intium Lab gave students excellent talks seperately.

Chao Tianyi, whose major background is journalism, gave a talk from a journalist’s view of data journalism. She shared  a case “Disco Election” in Intium Media, which showed a whole process of their work from idea to data visualisation and depth profiling of every procedure including data collection and analysis.

Most importantly, she also offered takeaway messages for journalists working in a data team, which is an intensively desire for our students. She told students “ Don’t be afraid of messy data, don’t be afraid of maths or coding. Don’t be afraid of learning new things.”

I can’t agree more with Chao Tianyi,  as traditional journalism students are always doing things with interviews, writing news, shooting fantastic scenes to find valuable and unique stories; data, math, coding & amount of fancy tools nowadays are far beyond their comfort zone. So Tianyi finally told students “cases in field of data journalism is not an individual project, it is a team work. Journalists need to find ask programmers for help to solve technological problems, but they should know how to communicate.” That’s why journalists should know the basic concept about technological part, because they need to have efficient communication skills to avoid ask stupid questions, or to waste time in uncertainty. What’s more, in the era of “big data” and “the internet”, it is an inevitable trend that everyone in whatever fields need to arm some basic skills within this era.

Here is Tianyi’s sharing about the PPT: http://slides.com/tianyichao/disco-election#/

Another talk is conducted by Hu Pili. He explained the algorithms behind the Legco HK project, more details into the data analysis part, the timeline, the patterns in the data set. These details and technologies behind the project just made students confused and it may be better if the auediences are computer science students. While, Pili also shows the fantastic products of the projects, http://initiumlab.com/#legco , the link is the softcopy and we also saw and touched the harcopy of the 3D product. Students are highly interested in these fancy objects.

In addition, Tianyi also introduced many useful data visualisation tools like Kumu( https://kumu.io/ ), and students used it in their outstanding term project!