One of the highlights of last week’s Global Investigative Journalism Conference was the session on text mining, where the New York Times’s Andy Lehren talked about his experiences of working with data from Wikileaks and elsewhere, and former Washington Post database editor Sarah Cohen gave her insights into various tools and techniques in text mining. Andy Lehren’s audio is embedded below.
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CableSearch is a neat project by the European Centre for Computer Assisted Research and VVOJ (the Dutch-Flemish association for investigative journalists) which aims to make it easier for journalists to interrogate the Wikileaks cables. Although it’s been around for some time, I’ve only just noticed the site’s API, so I thought I’d show how such an API can be useful as a
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This is the fifth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can also read part one, part two, part three, and part four. Corporatisation of the public sphere The public sphere used to be our territory, but we are failing to protect it online. The difficulties experienced by Wikileaks last year were the
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I’m probably not the only person to notice a curious development in how the Wikileaks material is being used in the press recently. From The Guardian and The Telegraph to The New York Times and The Washington Post, the news agenda is dictating the leaks, rather than the other way around. It’s fascinating because we are used to seeing leaks as
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Or, using Tagxedo and removing ‘Panorama’ and ‘Wikileaks’:
Here’s a well-produced (even in rough-cut form) documentary on Wikileaks by Swedish network SVT, published on YouTube in 4 parts. It covers quite a bit of the history of the organisation, the lessons it learned and the partnerships it made along the way – all of which provide valuable insights for any student of journalism as a practice or a
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Few things illustrate the challenges facing journalism in the age of ‘Big Data’ better than Cable Gate – and specifically, how you engage people with stories that involve large sets of data. The Cable Gate leaks have been of a different order to the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs. Not in number (there were 90,000 documents in the Afghanistan war
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French data journalism outfit Owni have put together an impressive app (also in English) that attempts to put a user-friendly interface on the intimidating volume of War Logs documents. The app allows you to filter the information by country and category, and also allows you to choose whether to limit results to incidents involving the deaths of wounding of civilians,
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Stefan Mey from Berlin talks to Julian Assange, spokesperson of the whistleblower platform Wikileak.org. The interview took place at the edge of the 26th Chaos Communication Congress, where he and his German colleague Daniel Schmitt gave a lecture on the current state and the future of Wikileaks.
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