WikiLeaks Taps Power Of the Press — The Media Equation.
Overview: a tool for exploring large document sets. This Associated Press, my employer, has submitted the following proposal to the Knight News Challenge, reproduced here because the original on Knight’s site eats the paragraph breaks and doesn’t display the full-res image. click for larger image, or awesome hi-res version Describe your project: Overview will be a tool for finding stories in large document sets, stories that might otherwise be missed.
We will use the AP’s newsroom as a real-world environment to design and build a system to help journalists clean, visualize, and explore very large document sets — tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. We want to build a tool to answer the question, “what’s in there?” Document dumps are becoming increasingly common, whether the result of freedom of information requests, government transparency initiatives, or leaks. Visualization is important because it allows the reporter to see patterns in the documents. What unmet need does your proposal answer? How is your idea new? SIGACTS-dec-2006.jpg - Knight2010Applications. Main Page / jstray / Overview: a tool for exploring large document sets Overview: a tool for exploring large document sets Project Title: Overview: a tool for exploring large document sets Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: 475,000 Expected amount of time required to complete project: 2 Total cost of project including all sources of funding: 600,000 Overview will be a tool for finding stories in large document sets, stories that might otherwise be missed.
Document dumps are becoming increasingly common, whether the result of freedom of information requests, government transparency initiatives, or leaks. Visualization is important because it allows the reporter to see patterns in the documents. The right algorithms are crucial, but things like data clean-up and import are often bigger real-world obstacles to getting something out of a huge document dump. The technology isn’t new and has existed in other fields, but it hasn’t been tailored to the needs of journalism. John Naughton WikiLeaks: two challenges for journalism. Simon Andrewes came to Cambridge last week to give an interesting talk in our Arcadia Seminar series on how the organisation of BBC News has changed over the last decade in response to the need to make financial savings and to address the demands of our emerging media ecosystem.
One of the things that interested me particularly was his sketch of the powerful tools the BBC is building to enable its journalists to keep on top of complex, fast-moving stories. Among other things, these new IT tools enable the Beeb to create ‘story communities’ based on its staff across the world who are working on aspects of a big story. The WikiLeaks controversy is, par excellence, such a story and, like many bloggers, academics and media commentators, I’ve been struggling to (a) keep up with it, and (b) make sense of it. Neither task is easy. Here’s a concept map I drew when first thinking about it. And this is just a very incomplete sketch of it. We need tools to help with this. UPDATES: 1. 2. Wikileaks_mindmap-v2.