Brown Institute for Media Innovation
Established in 2012, the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University School of Engineering has its counterpart at the Columbia University School of Journalism. These two very different arms together support the Institute’s mission to sponsor thinking, building and speculation about how stories are discovered and told in a networked, digitized world. The Brown Institute, with its east and west coast arms, continues the legacy of its two distinguished founders, who were married for over fifty years. David Brown attended both Stanford and the Columbia School of Journalism. He was a writer and film producer, known for such great films as The Verdict, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy and, with Steven Spielberg, the horror thriller Jaws. Helen Gurley Brown, for over thirty years the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine, is probably best known for her sassy best-seller Sex and the Single Girl, which was published in 28 countries, and stayed on the bestseller lists for over a year. She is credited with helping women look at the roles they have historically been expected to play and to explore how they can change those roles.
The Brown Institute brings together artists and technologists in a unique way. For example the Brown Institute hosted “Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things.”
This experiment in new forms and functions of storytelling attracted storytellers, game developers, makers, creative technologists, experience designers, and journalists to a one day story lab, an experiment in co-authorship led by the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia.
Maneesh Agrawala, former Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, was tapped to be Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute at Stanford. He started in September 2015, also joining the School of Engineering faculty as a Professor of Computer Science.
Agrawala’s research on design principles for visual communication, interactive tools for digital storytelling, and the perceptual and collaborative aspects of visual analysis techniques led him to teach the first short course on computation and journalism in 2008. His teaching also includes courses in visualization, human computer interaction and computer graphics, crossing computational thinking with design thinking. Among his awards are a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a SIGGRAPH significant New Research Award and an NSF CAREER award.
The Brown Institute breaks academic silos and rules at all levels. The Institute hosted a HardHat Dinner to celebrate opening the Institute’s new facility.
In 2015 the new West Coast Director, Maneesh Agrawala, joined East Coast Director Mark Hansen in choosing the Magic Awards for 2015. This year’s winning projects included an interactive personal drone tour guide; a documentary filmed with immersive video technology that maps the impact of the famine in South Sudan; and a “bicoastal” project that will allow journalists to analyze, visualize and interact with contractor data released by the Department of Defense. Individual Magic Grants can be up to $150,000, with funding reaching up to $300,000 for bicoastal projects, those having teams with members from both universities’ communities. The Brown Institute is also, for the first time, providing funding for a so-called “flagship project.” A flagship project is a continuation of a particularly promising Magic Grant that can receive up to $500,000 for the following year.
This year’s flagship project is the Science Surveyor (Bicoastal, Columbia and Stanford): One of the biggest challenges facing science journalists is the ability to quickly contextualize journal articles they are reporting on deadline. Science Surveyor is a tool that can help science journalists and others rapidly and effectively characterize the scientific literature for any topic by providing a contextual consensus, a timeline of publications surrounding the topic, and categorized funding. The Science Surveyor team consists of Marguerite Holloway, Laura Kurgan, Dennis Tenen, Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, Daniel McFarland, Dan Jurafsky and Sebastian Muñoz Najar Galvez.
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the School of Engineering at Stanford University and the Graduate School for Journalism at Columbia University invite applications by December 5, 2015 for the third Media Innovation Base Camp on January 15-17, 2016 at Stanford University in California. The Base Camp is the second of two, and offers a starting point for students who want to explore the interplay between story and technology, creating new ways to delight and inform.