Early in 2018, I had several senior journalism students who wanted to learn about machine learning. I knew nothing about it, and they knew that, and we plowed forward together.
The three student teams chose these topics:
- Sentiment analysis on subreddits for NBA teams
- Analysis of county court documents naming our university
- Analysis of tweets by one news organization for audience reactions, engagements
We quickly learned that knowing Python was a big plus. (Fortunately, we all knew Python.) Each of the teams found a different Python library to work with, and after a few weeks, projects were completed and demonstrated — although desired results were not achieved in all cases.
I crammed information mainly from two sources — a YouTube video series called Machine Learning Recipes with Josh Gordon, and something I’ve lost that explained in detail how a model was trained on the Iris Data Set. These provided a surprisingly solid foundation for beginning to understand how today’s machine learning projects are done.
Since then, I’ve continued to read casually about AI and machine learning. As more and more articles have appeared in the general press and news reports about face recognition and self-driving cars (among other topics related to AI), it’s become clear to me that journalism students need to know more about these technologies — if for no other reason than to avoid being bamboozled by buzzword-spewing politicians or tech-company flacks.
Since May 2020, I’ve been collecting resources, reading and researching, with an intention to teach a course about AI for communications students in spring 2021. This new blog is going to help me organize and prioritize articles, posts, videos, and more.
If it helps other people get a handle on AI, so much the better!
AI in Media and Society by Mindy McAdams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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