Rahul Bhargava is an educator, designer, and artist working on creative data storytelling and computational journalism in support of social justice and community empowerment. He creates data murals and theatre with communities, award-winning museum exhibits, AI-powered civic technologies with CSOs, and delivers hands-on workshops and keynote talks across the globe. Rahul’s first book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information,” is now available from Oxford University Press. He leads the Data Culture Group at Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design.
Research/Publications Highlights
Bhargava, R. (2025). Community Data: creative approaches to empowering people with information. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press.
Bhargava, R., Hadjis, E., Heckman, M. (2024) Testing Generative AI for Source Audits in Student-Produced Local News. Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC’24) Conference.
Heckman, M., Bhargava, R., Ndulue, E. (2023). Powering in Pearls and Willie Brown’s Mistress: A computational analysis of gendered news coverage of Kamala Harris on the partisan extremes. Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2280545
Bhargava, R. (2023). Data Representation as Epistemological Resistance. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Conference.
Bhargava, R., Bermejo, F., Chesnutt, K., Jefferies, D., & Ndulue, E. (2022). A Multinational Computational Analysis of Hyperlinking in News. Journalism Practice. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2022.2133780
Bhargava, R., Brea, A., Hinson, J., & Perovich, L. (2022) Data Theatre as an Entry Point to Data Literacy. Educational Technology & Society 25(4). https://www.j-ets.net/collection/published-issues/25_4
Bhargava, R., Suresh, H., Dogan, A.L., †So, W., Suárez Val, H. Fumega, S., D’Ignazio, C. (2022). News as Data for Activists: a case study in feminicide counterdata production. 2022 Conference + Journalism Conference (C+J22).
Zuckerman, E., Matias, J. N., Bhargava, R., Bermejo, F., & Ko, A. (2019). Whose Death Matters? A Quantitative Analysis of Media Attention to Deaths of Black Americans in Police Confrontations, 2013–2016. International Journal of Communication, 13(27).
Bhargava, R., Gaikwad, N., Jen, D., Saldías-Feuntes, B., Chung, A., Hope, A., Zuckerman, E. (2019). Gobo: A System for Exploring User Control of Invisible Algorithms in Social Media. Presented at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Austin, TX, USA.
Bhargava, R., & D’Ignazio, C. (2017). Data Sculptures as a Playful and Low-Tech Introduction to Working with Data. Presented at the Designing Interactive Systems, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Bhargava, R., Kadouaki, R., Bhargava, E., Castro, G., & D’Ignazio, C. (2016). Data Murals: Using the Arts to Build Data Literacy. The Journal of Community Informatics, 12(3).
Departments
Journalism, Art + Design
Education
- Master of Science in Media Arts & Science, MIT
- Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Minor in Multimedia Production, Carnegie Mellon University
Awards
- Co-Principal Investigator: Data Theatre for Civic Deliberation. With Dani Snyder-Young, Jonathan Carr, Michael Arnold Mages, Moira Zellner, Laura Perovich, and Antonio Ocampo-Guzman. Mellon Foundation: Cultures of US Democracy. $500,000. Awarded Feb 2025.
- Principal Investigator: Grassroots AI-supported News Monitoring with Human Rights Organizations. Proposal to Data Empowerment Fund. $100,000. Awarded May 2024.
- Co-Principal Investigator: Collaborative Research: HNDS-I: NewsScribe – Extending and Enhancing the Media Cloud Searchable Global Online News Archive. With Ethan Zuckerman (UMass Amherst) and Fernando Bermejo (Media Ecosystems Analysis Group). Proposal to NSF Human Networks and Data Science – Infrastructure program. $724,200. Awarded Mar, 2024.
- Principal Investigator. Media Cloud. Award from the Information Integrity and Information Pollution program of the Digital Public Goods Alliance and United Nations Development Programme. $7,000. Apr 2023.
- 2021 – (Grant) International Hate Observatory – Knight Foundation
- 2019 – University of Hyderabad. Visiting Researcher, College of Communications.
- 2018 – (Grant) Reality Redrawn Challenge Mozilla Foundation
- 2017 – (Grant) Digital Impact Grant Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civic Society
- 2016 – (Grant) Prototype Grant Knight Foundation
- 2014 – (Grant) Innovation Grant Making All Voices Count
- 2014 – Best Software American Political Science Association
- 2011 – Interactive Award Applied Arts
Past Clients
- Sasaki Associates. Visualization Designer. 2009
- WGBH Forum Network. Website Developer. 2009
- Science Museum of Minnesota. Museum Exhibit Design Consultant. 2006
Professional Affiliations
Research Focus
- data storytelling
- computational journalism
