Hilary Sharp

Undergraduate Fellow

Articles

Articles by Hilary Sharp

  • Events |

    National Day of Civic Hacking Comes to Chicago

    by Hilary Sharp

    Hackers, unite! For the first time, civic hackers across the nation will come together to participate in one of the largest collaborative hacking projects, National Day of Civic Hacking. The initial idea came from the White House’s desire to establish programming that increased government transparency. They reached out to hacking organizations like SecondMuse to help organize hackathon events across the country. These events will use data released by federal agencies to build useful tools that...

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  • Team news |

    Aaron Salmon joins Knight Lab as professional fellow

    by Hilary Sharp

    It all started with Quake II. Aaron Salmon and his gaming buddies — his “clan,” in the parlance of the game — played the first-person shooter game feverishly in the mid 90s when they decided what they really needed was a website to track scores and records. Salmon built it, reverse engineering the whole thing using view source and eventually filling it with clan member profiles, achievement badges, downloads of maps, and screenshots of clan...

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  • Team news |

    Creating hacker journalists: Medill and WaPo announce partnership

    by Hilary Sharp

    Last week the Washington Post and Medill School of Journalism announced a partnership to offer programmers scholarships to study journalism at the school. The hope, of course, is that those programmers will eventually bring their technical skills to news organizations around the country. “We need to have more technologists who speak journalism and have hands on experience with it,” says Rich Gordon, a Knight Lab co-founder and the Medill professor who founded the scholarship program....

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  • Team news |

    Knight Lab student fellow lands at Twitter

    by Hilary Sharp

    Katie Zhu Northwestern senior Katie Zhu had no journalism experience coming into college, just a love for writing and English. Almost four years later, Zhu has become a promising young journalist in the digital news world, combining her journalism major with a computer science major that has led to a bevy of journalism internships and an engineering job with Twitter. This technological leap from journalism was first inspired by an interactive project on the North...

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  • Lab projects |

    Symbolia: Process and challenge for the comics journalism startup

    by Hilary Sharp

    After a decade in news, Symbolia co-founder and publisher Erin Polgreen is adjusting to startup life. And, judging by the vigorous press coverage, it’s not all bad. Plus, there’s the actual work, which is also nice. “Operating as a start up is great because we can change course quickly if we need to,” says Polgreen, who launched Symbolia last week. “There’s not a lot of weight or infrastructure holding us back.” That ability to change...

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  • Apps & projects |

    Alan Taylor's journey from technologist to journalist

    by Hilary Sharp

    Alan Taylor, photo editor and curator of The Atlantic’s InFocus, hadn’t planned to become a journalist. But he did just that a few years ago while working as a programmer for Boston.com. For years, he’d been using interesting pictures to craft photographic series for friends and family. “I seemed to have a knack for seeing these jumbled photographs and putting them in an order that felt right,” Taylor says. “It may not be chronological, but...

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Posts tagged with Hilary Sharp

  • Lab projects , Team news |

    Updates from the past six months, PLUS! Come be a student fellow

    by Miranda Mulligan

    [KICKS OFF SHOES. FALLS INTO CHAIR. LETS OUT AUDIBLE EXHALE.] Oh. My. Guess what?! Last week was my first anniversary here at the Lab. I came to this job with the intention of substantially chipping away at the media-stack, innovative-systems-for-news-publications, journalism-tech "problem." Well, that  expectation was quite naïve. A university is not positioned to produce and support substantial, commercial-level software technology. One can expect ideas and students from a university. The product that a university contributes...

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