How Journalists Data-Mined the Wikileaks Docs

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday June 12, 2011 @03:15PM from the reading-between-a-million-lines dept.

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."

1 of 59 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Indirect links by b4dc0d3r · 2011-06-12 16:33 · Score: -1, Troll

Every time I hit a blog that links to an article, I keep advertising disabled on slashdot.
I have good enough karma to check the "disable advertising" box, I just browse without being logged in and keep noscript enabled.
I want information, and I am willing and capable of paying for it. But crap like this means I not only don't pay you, I load the page and don't load advertising for the article. Then I spend slashdot resources bitching about crapticles. Great business model.