Papers by Meredith Broussard
Born-digital news content is increasingly becoming the format of the first draft of history. Arch... more Born-digital news content is increasingly becoming the format of the first draft of history. Archiving and preserving this history is of paramount importance to the future of scholarly research, but many technical, legal, financial, and logistical challenges stand in the way of these efforts. This is especially true for news applications, or custom-built websites that comprise some of the most sophisticated journalism stories today, such as the " Dollars for Docs " project by ProPublica. Many news applications are standalone pieces of software that query a database, and this significant subset of apps cannot be archived in the same way as text-based news stories, or fully captured by web archiving tools such as Archive-It. As such, they are currently disappearing. This paper will outline the various challenges facing the archiving and preservation of born-digital news applications, as well as outline suggestions for how to approach this important work.
Digital Journalism, 2014
This paper describes an artificial intelligence-based software system that augments public affair... more This paper describes an artificial intelligence-based software system that augments public affairs reporters' ability to sort through data and identify investigative storytelling opportunities. A prototype of the model was developed and was used to analyze education data. The successful prototype and the social impact of the stories derived from the prototype suggest this approach as a valid option for newsrooms that seek to tell more compelling, data-rich stories about public affairs issues.
Currently the digital archives of newspapers are not archiving "news apps," which are interactive... more Currently the digital archives of newspapers are not archiving "news apps," which are interactive database-driven, multimedia projects. Because of the multiple elements required to access a news app, conversion of the dynamic news app into static HTML pages is one possible avenue for future archiving.
Applied research in computational journalism offers opportunities for scholars to engage with dat... more Applied research in computational journalism offers opportunities for scholars to engage with data and platforms by developing original code-based scholarship and research methods. However, scholars who write code need a place to publish about it. This paper suggests new article forms and academic publishing conventions that will allow the field of computational journalism to expand. It explores logistical details associated with sharing and publishing code, and describes reproducible research methods in use in other disciplines.
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Papers by Meredith Broussard