Hi, I'm Soma!

I run a cat rescue and teach data journalism at Columbia's J-School.

In historical times I talked too much about food, co-founded a fake school, got quoted in Elle magazine, and ran a recipe website.

Sites of interest

everything I know	about data journalism, anyway. mostly useful thanks to my perfect Python setup guide
aifaq.wtf	collected tweets and links about how weird and effed up the hypebeast world of AI is (featuring fish 🐟)
Normal AI	my favorite AI things that aren't ChatGPT
investigate.ai	baby-steps data science for journalists
Python's Not (Just) for Unicorns	an interactive introduction to programming in Python, for human beings and whoever else
Fancy GitHub	tips and tricks for making your GitHub profile shine
Data Viz Design Guide	a step-by-step design guide for data visualizations 🎉 📈
my YouTube channel	among other things, for some strange reason it's the most complete set of ai2html tutorials on the planet

Recent Talks

AI 202: Cooking with generative AI	NICAR 2024
How to make data viz with (almost) every tool	NICAR 2024
AI And ML: From Before And Beyond ChatGPT	NICAR 2024
Advanced Web Scraping with Playwright	Lede Program Info Session, 2024
Learn data journalism on your own!	Lede Program Info Session, 2023
Making and breaking AI in the newsroom	iMEdD Media Forum, 2023
AI + Journalism: In a world where robots can write like people, what's the role of the journalist?	Incoming CJS MS students, 2023
Reimagining the Humanities and Art with Generative AI	Fairfield University, 2023
Trusting AI in the newsroom: Hallucinations, bias, security and labor	ONA 2023
AI Tools from Before (and Beyond!) ChatGPT	ONA 2023
JournalismAI - Data and Technology	JournalismAI Academy for Small Newsrooms 2023
AI tool for Journalism Workshop	Abraji, 2023
Building and publishing with Quarto	C+J/European Data Journalism Conf 2023
How I convinced GPT to teach me about Hungarian folktales (without speaking a word of Hungarian)	MediaParty Chicago 2023
Building AI Editors	NICAR 2023
Practical Machine Learning for Everyone	NICAR 2023
Supercharge your coding workflow with ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot	NICAR 2023
An Introduction to ChatGPT for Educators (and maybe journalists)	Columbia Journalism School Faculty + Adjuncts, 2023

I love giving talks! Give me a shout at js4571@columbia.edu and we can make something happen.