Investigating How Population Changes Affect Voter Turnout
The Justice Media co-Lab is the first interdisciplinary curricular collaboration between the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) and The College of Communication (COM) at Boston University. Through projects secured by BU Spark!, the co-Lab aims to train data science and journalism students in computational investigative data journalism. The co-Lab has partnered with various news organizations such as the Associated Press, Boston Globe and CBS News.
One such collaboration was with The Bay State Banner resulting in a published article investigating the effect of population changes on voter turnout titled ‘Population changes upend voting patterns’. A team of six students worked on this project over the summer then handed it off to another team in the fall semester. The summer team was headed by Project Manager Anqui Lin and Assistant Project Manager Tania Hasanpoor. In the fall, the team consisted of four members: William Gao, Melisa Ellin, Julia Ha, and Stephanie Lieu.
When asked about the experience, Hasanpoor was excited to be working at the intersection of journalism and data science.
“The experience was great!” Hasanpoor says. “I really enjoy working in an interdisciplinary field. I love to see how they all come together and how much technology has potential in every field. I was the Assistant Project Manager for those two projects.”
For Gao, he was able to gain real world experience and confidence in his skills.
“This experience gave me exposure on how to work with real world datasets that can often be messy and hard to analyze,” Gao says. “Through this experience, I learned how to use Python to automate the process of extracting useful data from a PDF and normalizing & cleaning the pdf data into a spreadsheet. I now feel much more confident in working with unstructured data and data in unconventional formats.”
As the Data Science Project Manager, Gao was responsible for overseeing the data-related aspects. In order to research the story, he used Python, a programming language, to extract and transform Boston’s public voting data into a normalized format. This data was input into Tableau to create geospatial maps to generate visualizations for the mayoral and city council election. Gao was then able to conduct research into how Boston demographics have changed between the years 2010 and 2020. As part of his role, he collaborated with Ellin, the Journalism Project Manager who conducted qualitative and contextual research on Boston’s voting patterns.
When asked why he decided to join the co-Lab, Gao highlights its multifaceted nature.
“I was particularly intrigued by the Justice Media co-Lab due to its interdisciplinary nature incorporating data science with journalism for the common mission of justice & transparency” Gao shares.
For students interested in getting involved, Gao enthusiastically encourages them to register on the Student Link whether or not they have a background in data science.
“The Justice Media co-Lab course does not require any prior experience in data science or journalism,” Gao affirms. “Just an eagerness to learn and an interest in social justice.”