This paper calls for greater scrutiny of data journalism as a practice in the semi authoritarian context of Zimbabwe. Based on in-depth interviews with practising journalists in Zimbabwe, this paper answers two main questions: In what ways is data journalism practised in the Zimbabwean context? To what extent are newsrooms in Zimbabwe “tooled” and capacitated for data journalism practices? We note that data journalism is widely understood by individual journalists in this country but paradoxically less practised due to many challenges. By answering these two questions, we sustain an argument that data journalism appropriation in semi-authoritarian contexts can be instrumental in promoting monitorial democracy and reversing media decadence.
Category: Sector: Media
Hard Questions: Media
-
From the classroom to the newsroom: A critical route to introduce AI in journalism education
From a computer vision application to monitor elections transparency in Argentina to automated real estate texts in Norway, and everything in between, Artificial Intelligence powered tools are changing journalism. Scholars have taken note, and the academic production of AI in journalism has gained considerable ground in the last five years. However, research on how journalism education deals with AI influence in the industry is scarce. Based on a self-training method using available online free courses for journalists and a review of university teaching initiatives, this article proposes key elements to trace teaching trajectories to introduce AI into journalism curriculum. Included are recommendations for drawing a path to teaching journalism students to think critically about AI and, at the same time, to understand the available tools for reporting and investigating in a complex context where journalism lives in a profound state of crisis.
-
Data journalism in the age of big data: An exploration into the uptake of data journalism in leading south African Newspapers
The growing capacity to generate large quantities of data as a result of rapid technological change in the recent past has meant that increasingly, journalists everywhere are under pressure to find new ways of handling this information deluge, processing and packaging it in ways that allow ease of access for their readers. These data blizzards have been further intensified by the ever-expanding social media networks that keep churning out large volumes of information at unprecedented speed, making gathering, processing and packaging information in visualisable form all the more important. The rise of data journalism is in part a direct response to this, as it provides journalists the critical tools to manipulate data on complex issues such as national budgets, election manifestos and national census for innovative storytelling. This chapter explores the emergence of data journalism in South Africa and analyses its …
-
Deep Learning based Automatic Image Caption Generation
The paper aims at generating automated captions by learning the contents of the image. At present images are annotated with human intervention and it becomes nearly impossible task for huge commercial databases. The image database is given as input to a deep neural network (Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)) encoder for generating “thought vector” which extracts the features and nuances out of our image and RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) decoder is used to translate the features and objects given by our image to obtain sequential, meaningful description of the image. In this paper, we systematically analyze different deep neural network-based image caption generation approaches and pretrained models to conclude on the most efficient model with fine-tuning. The analyzed models contain both with and without `attention’ concept to optimize the caption generating ability of the model.
-
The impact of India-UK co-production agreement: A systematic review of transmedia storytelling and business models in films
The concept of transmedia storytelling is unique in the sense that it entails telling different portions of a story on separate media platforms. Furthermore, it varies from other forms of cross-platform distribution. The adaption of transmedia storytelling perspectives and business models in creative co-production ventures is an evolving phenomenon, which presents scarce evidence in extant studies. In the light of the recent India-UK co-production treaty, this paper is aimed at offering a thematic analysis of evidence concerning the transmedia storytelling and business models in films and co-production ventures. The paper reviews existing studies and published work over the past fifty years to suggest a thematic map of research for future research ventures in this fairly under-researched area. Along with several crucial findings, the study confirms that more focused studies in the area will help to form clear assertions about the cultural, artistic, and economical possibilities of the film co-production agreement between the Republic of India and the United Kingdom and bilateral impacts of the same in creative agendas. The study offers crucial practical and theoretical implications for future analysis of the creative progression of co-production elements, which will also map the developmental graph of transmedia evolution, and also the variables involved in the exchange of practice facilities and infrastructure between the two countries.