Northeastern’s Rahul Bhargava talks about his innovative approach to making sense of data
It’s an all-Northeastern podcast this week as Ellen Clegg and I talk with Rahul Bhargava, a colleague at Northeastern University. Rahul is a professor who crosses boundaries: the boundaries of storytelling and data, the boundaries of deep dives into collaborative research and interactive museum exhibits and plays.
He holds a master’s degree in media arts and science from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. But he also minored in multimedia production. He brings the power of big data research to the masses, through newsroom workshops, interactive museum exhibits and more.
Bhargava has collaborated with groups in Brazil, in Minnesota and at the World Food Program. He helps local communities use data to understand their world, and as a tool for change. There’s more to data than just bar charts. Sometimes it involves forks! His recently published book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information,” unlocks all sorts of secrets.
Keeping with our all-Huskies theme, Ellen and I also talk with Lisa Thalhamer, a longtime TV journalist who is now a graduate student at Northeastern. Lisa realized that like many fields, journalism suffers from a gap between academic research and its implementation in workplaces. She is finding ways to bridge that gap, and urges an Avenger’s-style team to lift up the work of a free press.
Ellen has a Quick Take on a recent visit to Santa Barbara, California, and the efforts to revive a legacy paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press.
My Quick Take is about the latest developments from the National Trust for Local News. It involves a chain of weekly papers in Colorado — their very first acquisition dating back to 2021. And it’s not good news at all for the journalists who work at those papers and the communities they serve.
You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
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