Tag Archives: entity extraction

Making video and audio interviews searchable: how Pinpoint helped with one investigation

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Pinpoint creates a ranking of people, organisations, and locations with the number of times they are mentioned on your uploaded documents.

MA Data Journalism student Tony Jarne spent eight months investigating exempt accommodation, collecting hundreds of documents, audio and video recordings along the way. To manage all this information, he turned to Google’s free tool Pinpoint. In a special guest post for OJB, he explains how it should be an essential part of any journalist’s toolkit.

The use of exempt accommodation — a type of housing for vulnerable people — has rocketed in recent years.

At the end of December, a select committee was set up in Parliament to look into the issue. The select committee opened a deadline, and anyone who wished to do so could submit written evidence.

Organisations, local authorities and citizens submitted more than 125 pieces of written evidence to be taken into account by the committee. Some are only one page — others are 25 pages long.

In addition to the written evidence, I had various reports, news articles, Land Registry titles an company accounts downloaded from Companies House.

I needed a tool to organise all the documentation. I needed Pinpoint. 

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AUDIO: Text mining tips from Andy Lehren and Sarah Cohen

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Searches made of the Sarah Palin emails

Searches made of the Sarah Palin emails - from a presentation by the New York Times's Andy Lehren

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. The story mentioned on North Korean missile deals can be found here. Other relevant links: Infomine and NICAR Net Tour.

And here’s Sarah’s talk which covers extracting information from large sets of documents. Many of the tools mentioned are bookmarked ‘textmining’ on my Delicious account.