How Journalists Data-Mined the Wikileaks Docs

meckdevil writes "Associated Press developer-journalist extraordinaire Jonathan Stray gives a brilliant explanation of the use of data-mining strategies to winnow and wring journalistic sense out of massive numbers of documents, using the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks as a case in point. The concepts for focusing on certain groups of documents and ignoring others are hardly new; they underlie the algorithms used by the major Web search engines. Their use in a journalistic context is on a cutting edge, though, and it raises a fascinating quandary: By choosing the parameters under which documents will be considered similar enough to pay attention to, journalist-programmers actually choose the frame in which a story will be told. This type of data mining holds great potential for investigative revelation — and great potential for journalistic abuse."

Comments

Re:But this isn't reasoned analysis

[MimeticLie]

Actually, if you watch the video, that's not what Stray is talking about. Rather than doing targeted searches, he's talking about processing the whole dataset and using algorithms to establish connections. The narrative that makes sense of those clusters is what would (hopefully) be the reasoned analysis.