Simona Bisiani
News deserts. NLP. Data journalism. R and Python. Local news. Computational social science.
I am a computational journalism Doctoral Researcher at the newly founded Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI. My PhD focuses on measuring spatial variations in news coverage in the UK to understand the robustness of local media coverage across the country, and how ownership consolidation affects media diversity and relevance - and whether media diversity and relevance affect democratic engagement. My primary research methods are text mining (including ML), and causal inference.
I became fascinated in data journalism during my BA in Scotland, while trying to map social inequalities using census data. The desire to harness the power of data and better grasp the responsibilities coming with it got me to pursue a MSc in Computational Social Science, where I delved in the theory and practice of social network analysis, agent-based modelling, dimensionality reduction methods, and web scraping.
I have also worked as a data journalist at Sheldon.studio and at DataJournalism.com. At DataJournalism.com, I have created, analysed, visualised, and digitally presented the State of Data Journalism 2021, 2022, and 2023 surveys. At Sheldon.studio, I was the principal data analyst, chart chooser, and content writer for Disabled Data, a project that shed light on the difficulties surrounding availability of data on people with disabilities in Italy, and on The Sanction Tracker for data.europa.eu.
news
| May 5, 2024 | I have been hired by Professor Agnes Gulyas at the School of Creative Arts and Industries in the University of Canterbury to write an industry report of the state of local media research |
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| Jan 1, 2024 | I have been hired by the UK charity the Public Interest News Foundation as a Data Architect for their local media database: https://www.publicinterestnews.org.uk/map |
| Jan 1, 2024 | I am, for the third year now, running the State of Data Journalism Survey for the European Journalism Centre, handling survey creation, data analysis, data visualisation, writing about the findings, and presenting them on the web: https://ejc.net/state-of-data-journalism-survey-2023 |
| Dec 1, 2023 | I have published my first PhD linked journal article in the peer-reviewed journal MDPI’s Journalism and Media, on the Limitations and Effects on Findings of various commonly used local media databases in the UK: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/4/4/77 |
| Sep 22, 2023 | I have been hired as Teaching Assistant for the Topics in People-Centred AI module running at the University of Surrey in the fall of 2023, targeted at the MSc in Artifical Intelligence students. |