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Iris Lee, data journalist for the Los Angeles Times, joined the Emerging Media and Technology class “Data in Emerging Media and Technology” virtually to talk about her job and recent projects. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lee has played a vital role in helping her team create digital dashboards that show positive cases, vaccination rates, school closings and other important information happening throughout Los Angeles and surrounding areas. She has also helped create virtual maps that can show where wildfires are occurring through the state of California.  

The class has recently been learning about the programming application Python, which is also something that Lee uses in her field. Python is used to scrape and download data from government sites and other locations that have publicly shared information. She walked the students through how she uses Python to gather data and create digital content like dashboards, interactive articles and stories.  Lee told the students about how data journalism can help communities become aware of what is happening around them: 

“As a data journalist, we have to think of what we can do to help the community.” 

Assistant Professor David Silva is the course instructor.