Zhaozhou Dai

Zhaozhou Dai is a second-year journalism graduate student in the program Master of Science in Media Innovation and Data Communication at Northeastern University. His research interests focus on the intersection of communication and social media; data reporting with emerging media technologies, and computational journalism with visualization. 

He specializes in data analysis, data visualization and scrollytelling. Aside from works at Co-Lab, Zhaozhou is also currently working on a research direction about how digitization and platformization create new kinds of work and business opportunities from a comparative perspective by analyzing data and visualization.

Research/Publications Highlights

Current Research –  Software Tools to Support Climate Change Reporting: Addressing Gaps and Needs among Journalists
Melting glaciers and rising sea levels, birds’ changing migratory patterns, and increasing temperatures have made it obvious that climate change is affecting all aspects of people’s lives.

This research project seeks to design software tools for journalists covering climate change in order to address gaps and needs. The study involves interviews with professional U.S. and international climate journalists about the issues they face and what kinds of tools might support their work. Motivated by the challenges that journalists express about gathering critical information and climate-related data from government agencies, this project creates a web-based application using the R programming language and building from the R Shiny software library.

The project involves the building of an interactive prototype to support high-quality, accurate climate reporting.