Our department is engaged in a number of interesting initiatives, projects and international conferences. Here is a tally of recent and/or ongoing initiatives:

• Central Asian Journalism Summer Institute provides early-career journalists and journalism students with the skills they need to launch successful careers in journalism and media. The Summer Institute will provide an interactive curriculum to develop participants’ skills in areas such as data journalism, digital media, social media, podcasting, and storytelling. Apply now for CAJSI 2020!
• ‘Kurak of tolerance‘ data art project is an experiment in data art about AUCA community, a project by a team consisting of AUCA students, alumni, professors and staff. It won the special prize (jury choice) at the Moscow Dataviz Awards.
• “Excellent Data Journalism“ course for journalism university instructors of Kyrgyzstan. Organized in partnership with School of Data Kyrgyzstan, it took place in November 2019 and provided current and future journalism instructors with the skills of working with data and enabled them to include these elements into their curricula.
• Data Art Workshop that took place at AUCA in May 2019 and resulted in the data art exhibition at the DataCon Central Asia 2019.
• Hack Poverty Data Journalism Hackathon that took place in AUCA in March 2018 and gathered 50+ journalists, designers and developers that hacked various aspects of poverty in teams to present their results in different formats of data storytelling.
• Ilim Elim, a first-of-its-kind video encyclopedia comprised of lectures on an array of subjects given by experts in the Kyrgyz language.
• Data Journalism Institute 2017 that trained media professionals and journalism instructors in the tools and techniques for using data to tell stories.