Computational Journalism is much broader than just data-mining. At Georgia Tech I taught courses in the area in 2007 and 2008 which covered everything from mobile newsgathering, to information visualization, automatic content analysis, social computing, storytelling and authorship, aggregation, summarization, information mashups, and consumption interfaces. The bigger question is: how can computation help in every aspect of journalism: gathering, sensemaking, authoring, and dissemination, while still maintaining the values and ethics of good journalism.
Anyone interested in delving deeper into this should watch the videos from the Symposium on Computation and Journalism that we organized at Georgia Tech in 2008.
Another effort at getting humans to transcribe snippets of audio (via a game) is Audio Puzzler. It's somewhat similar in spirit to the audio reCAPTCHAs, but actually forms a puzzle game where you have to connect the snippets of transcribed audio to complete the puzzle. This also makes it somewhat easier since you have some context for understanding the spoken words. The problem with the audio reCAPTCHA system now is that words may be truncated and with a lack of context it's difficult to understand partial words or proper nouns. They are HARD to solve (even for humans).
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Computational Journalism is much broader than just data-mining. At Georgia Tech I taught courses in the area in 2007 and 2008 which covered everything from mobile newsgathering, to information visualization, automatic content analysis, social computing, storytelling and authorship, aggregation, summarization, information mashups, and consumption interfaces. The bigger question is: how can computation help in every aspect of journalism: gathering, sensemaking, authoring, and dissemination, while still maintaining the values and ethics of good journalism. Anyone interested in delving deeper into this should watch the videos from the Symposium on Computation and Journalism that we organized at Georgia Tech in 2008.
Another effort at getting humans to transcribe snippets of audio (via a game) is Audio Puzzler. It's somewhat similar in spirit to the audio reCAPTCHAs, but actually forms a puzzle game where you have to connect the snippets of transcribed audio to complete the puzzle. This also makes it somewhat easier since you have some context for understanding the spoken words. The problem with the audio reCAPTCHA system now is that words may be truncated and with a lack of context it's difficult to understand partial words or proper nouns. They are HARD to solve (even for humans).