May 10, 2022 | Playground
A neat side effect of this little blog is that it continues to serve as a starter of conversations with interesting people – like Ilan Manouach, who originally got in touch to discuss synthetic media. After a fruitful first exchange, we decided a proper interview would be in order. In case you haven’t heard of Ilan yet: He’s a very prolific Greek-Belgian digital artist, musician, writer, researcher, and scholar with a strong interest in AI, avant-garde publishing, post-modern disruption, and – possibly first and foremost – comics in all shapes and sizes. Ilan’s current jobs include that of a visiting scholar at Harvard’s metaLAB and a consultant for Onassis Publications. In short, he‘s a great colloquist when you‘re into innovation and next level ideas.
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Mar 15, 2022 | Playground, Projects
Terms like “XR” and “metaverse” are all the rage (again) and have made almost every tech trends list this year. Media producers expect a steady increase in immersive content consumption, business gurus even see a whole new computing platform on the horizon. Time for a quick recap of the medium, its relevance, and its potential – especially with regard to news media organizations.
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Dec 9, 2021 | Playground, Projects
One of the benefits of working with DW ReCO is that the team is so resourceful. When running into a technical challenge, there’s no need to wait for a standard solution to appear in an app store; our colleagues just open their laptops and start hacking. Like Andy Giefer, who was recently looking for a smart way to analyze sessions on Twitter Spaces.
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Oct 26, 2021 | Playground, Projects
Being able to generate synthetic media content “at the push of a button” is as fascinating as it is dangerous. On the one hand, there is the significant boost in productivity and creativity. On the other hand, there is the dystopian vision of a technology that fosters disinformation and violates a plethora of rights.
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Aug 24, 2021 | News, Playground, Projects
There are those who say that when you are occupied with creating and disseminating fact-based reports dealing with current events, that will always be called journalism – no matter what kind of tools you enlist. However, other people argue that there is a significant difference between writing a standard newspaper article and putting out a multilayered, interactive digital story that features text, pictures, videos, audio, and data repositories. While we hope that there continues to be a common denominator, we tend to agree that there are now indeed very different kinds of journalism, some of them driven by technologies that were in their infancy or not available just a decade ago. In the following post, we will take a closer look at three new (sub)categories of digital reporting that are particularly appealing to us and have played a significant role in recent projects: Augmented Reality (AR) Journalism, Drone Journalism, and Journalism of Things (JoT).
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May 25, 2021 | News, Playground, Projects
The European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet), set up in 2017, is all about “producing and promoting data-driven coverage of European topics”. As of May 2021, it has 29 members (including DW) in 14 different countries, and the EC has just granted a new round of funding. Time for a chat with Chiara Sighele and Lorenzo Ferrari, staff members of the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT), but first and foremost: the main coordinators of EDJNet.
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