This year, in addition to playing with freely available time series data on the main d8taplex site, I started playing around with news aggregation and clustering. This initially started as an interest in hapax legomena but the page has since become more general extracting keywords, hapax, countries and quotes. A few observations about news as we experience it on the web:
- The news cycle and news sources are hugely influenced by news agencies like AP, Reuters, AFP, etc. In fact, many of the articles that pop to the top of aggregators like Google News are simply pass-alongs from these sources.
- Attribution in the news space is flakey. Some sources (like AP Reuters) provide pretty detailed attribution, even going as far as indicating who reported, wrote and edited a piece of content. Other primary sources (like BBC) don't mention individuals at all.
- In general, news sourced from agencies and passed along is attributed to the agency and in some cases, an original article reports and summarizes the content of several primary sources.
- While news is in no way an unbiased view of the world, it has an annoying tendency to be self fulfilling by focusing attention on events thereby making them important and thus news-worthy.
With these, and other considerations in mind, I've been working on the next version of the news page. It is not quite ready to go up on the site, but it focuses on understanding
- How much attention agencies give to various countries (because the system crawls the agency data at the source it gets to see through the bias that the customers of the agencies put on the news).
- How much investment the agencies make to those regions. By monitoring the number of reporters / writers and editors that cover areas we can understand the agencies investment. Some countries get a single person while others get a herd of contributors.
- How the agenda of the agencies is transformed through the downstream publishers.
I'm hoping to get an initial version up in the next week, so stay tuned!
Looking forward to the new page!
I am mindful, however, that the news and its interpretation "...is just us." See Stanley Fish, "Is there a text in this class?" http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/6555139
That is to say that what we "see" as news and our interpretation of it varies from person to person, without any hope of standing "outside" of our perspective. Oh, academics pretend to but the "other" perspective they have is another one of theirs for the occasion. Not a bad thing, although it does deprive the power elite of the claim that their perspective transcends personal interest and reaches a realm of "truth," beyond questioning.
Hope you are enjoying the holidays!
Patrick
Posted by: www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnCYF4H7VHqH2Bl7SZt1Ev7rDFCr0Vx4f4 | December 23, 2011 at 03:21 PM