[1] The field draws on technical aspects of computer science including artificial intelligence, content analysis (NLP, NLG, vision, audition), visualization, personalization and recommender systems as well as aspects of social computing and information science.
In July 2009, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University hosted a workshop to push the field forward.
The course covers many computer science topics from the perspective of journalism, including document vector space representation, algorithmic and social story selection (recommendation algorithms), language topic models, information visualization, knowledge representation and reasoning, social network analysis, quantitative and qualitative inference, and information security.
In the beginning, therefore, it was more an aspect area linked to the discipline of data science, where the research and exploration of a fact may be automated.
But it is just with the rise of artificial intelligence that it has become possible to explore new types of applications, even up to the automation of news writing (text generation).