Ishaan Jhaveri

A deep dive into the Pine Tree Flag, one of the most prominent symbols seen at the Jan. 6th Capitol Riots, and the political movements, Christian Dominionism and Christian Nationalism, behind it.

This is a talk about the upgrades we have made to the VizPol system, a tool to help journalists identify unfamiliar political symbols. The talk will begin by summarizing the main VizPol system which we detailed for a paper accepted to C+J 2020. I will highlight the reason it was conceptualized, design choices the team made, ethical questions we considered and briefly address the technical challenges we surmounted. I will then introduce the two main points of the talk, a) the expansion to a… Show more

This is a talk about the upgrades we have made to the VizPol system, a tool to help journalists identify unfamiliar political symbols. The talk will begin by summarizing the main VizPol system which we detailed for a paper accepted to C+J 2020. I will highlight the reason it was conceptualized, design choices the team made, ethical questions we considered and briefly address the technical challenges we surmounted. I will then introduce the two main points of the talk, a) the expansion to a web-based, browser-accessible version of VizPol and b) what we have learnt about the efficacy and future feasibility of the system from speaking to users. For a) I will explain what drove the need to create a web app and how the web app can support more use cases for the base VizPol system than the mobile app can. I will end this section of the talk with a demo of the web app’s functionality. For b) I will explain our model for employing user submitted content to expand the symbols the tool’s ML model is able to identify, why the success of the tool depends on the buy-in from the user community, who our target users are, how we have approached them so far, possible reasons why we haven’t reached as many committed users as we would have like to and finally what we can do differently moving forward to achieve the committed user community we need for the tool to work and update as it was originally intended to. Show less

Nina Berman and I explain the familiar and unfamiliar political symbols seen at the January 6th Capitol Hill Insurrection.

I present data about the increasing occurrence of the pro-police Thin Blue Line flag at Trump rallies and discuss its significance.

A piece comparing the ages of signatories to "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" published in Harper's Magazine in July 2020 with the ages of signatories to a statement countering this letter. This also serves as a tutorial on how OSINT techniques can be used to determine someone's age.

In recent weeks, the United States has seen two distinct waves of protests. In April and early May, so-called “Reopen America” protests expressed opposition to COVID-19 lockdown measures in many states. Currently, demonstrators across the country are protesting against anti-black police brutality, in response to the killing of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. Researchers at the Tow Center and Columbia’s Journalism and Engineering schools have developed a tool… Show more

In recent weeks, the United States has seen two distinct waves of protests. In April and early May, so-called “Reopen America” protests expressed opposition to COVID-19 lockdown measures in many states. Currently, demonstrators across the country are protesting against anti-black police brutality, in response to the killing of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. Researchers at the Tow Center and Columbia’s Journalism and Engineering schools have developed a tool called VizPol that can help reporters decipher the symbols and acronyms used by political groups which may be helpful as they report on political actions now and during the election season. Show less

I wrote about how much of the Indian media's early coverage of COVID-19 in India was Islamophobic and how the government used the crisis to crack down on journalism.

Sam Thielman and I analyzed where Michael Bloomberg spent his TV advertising budget from data that I collected.

The Political Visual Literacy (PVL) app is a graphical-recognition system designed to support and inform the work of journalists as they encounter unfamiliar and evolving graphical imagery in the field. Using a combination of computer vision machine-learning techniques and user feedback, the mobile application allows users to select symbols within photographs on their mobile device and receive information about the meaning of those symbols in real-time. A web-based version of the tool allows… Show more

The Political Visual Literacy (PVL) app is a graphical-recognition system designed to support and inform the work of journalists as they encounter unfamiliar and evolving graphical imagery in the field. Using a combination of computer vision machine-learning techniques and user feedback, the mobile application allows users to select symbols within photographs on their mobile device and receive information about the meaning of those symbols in real-time. A web-based version of the tool allows newsroom editors and
others the use the system on desktop devices. The goal is to provide journalists with more information about rapidly evolving political symbols in a way that can be seamlessly integrated into their existing workflows. Show less

An explanation of our tool, VizPol, that can help reporters decipher the symbols and acronyms used by political groups which may be helpful as they report on political demonstrations.

Detroit’s 36th District Court put up barriers to scraping their website that make it very difficult for the kind of research that lead to our important story in 2018.

Ryan Felton and I wrote about the predatory lending practices of Credit Acceptance Corporation, an auto loan maker in Detroit, Michigan.

A methodology for the data collection and analysis that went into the story, "How a Subprime Auto Lender Consumed Detroit With Debt and Turned Its Courthouse Into a Collections Agency."

I wrote about the first legal case in America where the Right of Privacy was discussed, at the turn of the 20th century when a young Rochester, NY girl's portrait was used for an ad campaign without her consent. This story caused the City of Rochester to induct the story’s subject into their archive of "Remarkable Rochestrians"