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Tom Johnson

The Overview Project » Document mining shows Paul Ryan relying on the the pro... - 0 views

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    Document mining shows Paul Ryan relying on the the programs he criticizes by Jonathan Stray on 11/02/2012 0 One of the jobs of a journalist is to check the record. When Congressman Paul Ryan became a vice-presidential candidate, Associated Press reporter Jack Gillum decided to examine the candidate through his own words. Hundreds of Freedom of Information requests and 9,000 pages later, Gillum wrote a story showing that Ryan has asked for money from many of the same Federal programs he has criticized as wasteful, including stimulus money and funding for alternative fuels. This would have been much more difficult without special software for journalism. In this case Gillum relied on two tools: DocumentCloud to upload, OCR, and search the documents, and Overview to automatically sort the documents into topics and visualize the contents. Both projects are previous Knight News Challenge winners. But first Gillum had to get the documents. As a member of Congress, Ryan isn't subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, Gillum went to every federal agency - whose files are covered under FOIA - for copies of letters or emails that might identify Ryan's favored causes, names of any constituents who sought favors, and more. Bit by bit, the documents arrived - on paper. The stack grew over weeks, eventually piling up two feet high on Gillum's desk. Then he scanned the pages and loaded them into the AP's internal installation of DocumentCloud. The software converts the scanned pages to searchable text, but there were still 9000 pages of material. That's where Overview came in. Developed in house at the Associated Press, this open-source visualization tool processes the full text of each document and clusters similar documents together, producing a visualization that graphically shows the contents of the complete document set. "I used Overview to take these 9000 pages of documents, and knowing there was probably going to be a lot of garbage or ext
Tom Johnson

Statistical Reasoning I - 0 views

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    Statistical Reasoning 1 http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/StatisticalReasoning1/coursePage/index/ Most people could probably use a bit of a refresher on statistical reasoning and its methods, and this free course from Johns Hopkins University is a great way to get started on the road back to statistical literacy. The course was originally taught by John McGready and provides "a broad overview of biostatistical methods and concepts used in the public health sciences." Users will find that the home page includes links to the course syllabus, schedule, lecture materials, readings, and additional assignments. The Lecture Materials area includes course notes from the seven modules here. The topics include "Describing Data," "An Introduction to Hypothesis Testing," and "When Time Is of Interest: The Case for Survival Analysis." Visitors can also take advantage of the assignments, which correspond to the readings and the lecture materials. The site is completed by the Other Resources area, which includes a special lecture on the software package Stata and a flowchart designed to help students learn how to choose the correct statistical procedure for the task at hand. [KMG]
Tom Johnson

Narrative + investigative: tips from IRE 2012, Part 1 - Nieman Storyboard - A project o... - 0 views

  • Narrative + investigative: tips from IRE 2012, Part 1 At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, after a Phoenix reporter died in a car bomb while covering the mob, is usually considered an investigative-only playground, but narrative writers can learn a lot from these journalists’ techniques and resources. When might a narrative writer need investigative skills? A few possible scenarios: • When developing a character’s timeline and activities beyond the basic backgrounding • When navigating precarious relationships with sources • When organizing large and potentially complicated amounts of material • When gathering data and documents that might provide storytelling context – geopolitical, financial, etc. We asked This Land correspondent Kiera Feldman to cover the conference with an eye for material that might be particularly useful in narrative. She netted a range of ideas, tips and resources. Today, in Part 1, she covers areas including documents and data, online research and source relationships. Check back tomorrow for Part 2, “Writing the Investigative Story,” with best practices from Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times and Steve Fainaru of ESPN.
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    Narrative + investigative: tips from IRE 2012, Part 1 At last month's Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, after a Phoenix reporter died in a car bomb while covering the mob, is usually considered an investigative-only playground, but narrative writers can learn a lot from these journalists' techniques and resources. When might a narrative writer need investigative skills? A few possible scenarios: * When developing a character's timeline and activities beyond the basic backgrounding * When navigating precarious relationships with sources * When organizing large and potentially complicated amounts of material * When gathering data and documents that might provide storytelling context - geopolitical, financial, etc. We asked This Land correspondent Kiera Feldman to cover the conference with an eye for material that might be particularly useful in narrative. She netted a range of ideas, tips and resources. Today, in Part 1, she covers areas including documents and data, online research and source relationships. Check back tomorrow for Part 2, "Writing the Investigative Story," with best practices from Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times and Steve Fainaru of ESPN.
Tom Johnson

IRE Hands-On Training Materials | Tableau Public - 0 views

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    IRE Hands-On Training Materials To use these files, you need Tableau Public Desktop. It's free-- just click the orange "Download" button in the top right part of the page. Unfortunately, it's Windows only at this time, so you'll need Parallels or Bootcamp (or a friendly colleague with a PC) to run it on a Mac.
Tom Johnson

National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Per... - 0 views

  • INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web To
  • INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they’re available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the “driving.” scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you’ve bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you’re doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: Personal Archiving, Web Tools
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    " INFOdocket Information Industry News + New Web Sites and Tools From Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy National Science Foundation Helps Fund scrible, A New Web Annotation Tool/Personal Web Cache + Video Demo Posted on May 12, 2011 by Gary D. Price scrible (pronounced scribble) launched about a week ago and you can learn more (free to register and use) here. The company has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. From Venture Beat: The company lets users do three things: Save articles and pages so they're available if the original goes offline; richly annotate online content using tools reminiscent of Word (highlighter, sticky note, etc.), and share annotated pages privately with others. scrible is free and will continue to be free to all users (125MB of storage space). A premium edition is also planned but features (aside from a larger storage quota) have not been announced. Robert Scoble has posted a video demo of scrible with the CEO of of the company, Victor Karkar, doing the "driving." scrible sounds a lot like Diigo without the mobile access options. It also sounds similar (minus the markup features) to Pinboard. Pinboard does charge $9.97 for a lifetime membership with almost all features (there are many with new ones are debut regularly). For an extra $25/year all of the material you've bookmarked is cached by Pinboard. Cached pages look great INCLUDING PDF files. Pinboard is extremely fast and has a very low learning curve. Think Delicious and then add a ton of useful tools to it. Pinboard also provides mobile access to your saved bookmarks and cached documents. Finally, when used responsibly (aka abused) there are no storage space quotas. Which service do you prefer or does each service have a niche depending on the work you're doing? What other tools to you use? Hat Tips and Thanks: @NspireD2 and @New Media Consortium Share this: Share Tagged: Annotation Tools, Diigo, Pinboard, scrible Posted in: P
Tom Johnson

Public sector needs to improve quality of information, warns Eurim | Guardian Governmen... - 0 views

  • Public sector needs to improve quality of information, warns Eurim Parliamentary group gives cautious welcome to the EU's plans to open up more public sector data reddit this omnitracker.omniTrackEVarEvent( 12, 16, 'Guardian Government Computing: Reddit', 'click', '.reddit a' ); Comments (0) Sade Laja Guardian Professional, Monday 19 December 2011 07.08 EST Article history Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.
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    Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.
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    An important article. Please read.
Tom Johnson

BBC | BBC College of Journalism Blog - #bbcsms: BBC processes for verifying social medi... - 0 views

  • << previous blog | recent blogs | next blog >> #bbcsms: BBC processes for verifying social media content Alex Murray | Wednesday 18 May 2011, 10:40 From Tunisia, via Egypt, to Libya and Syria, verifying and acquiring eyewitness/citizen journalist/user-generated content has become increasingly complicated as the material has become more sophisticated. At the UGC (user-generated content) Hub in the BBC Newsroom in London, our process has become much more forensic in nature and includes: - Referencing locations against maps and existing images from, in particular, geo-located ones. - Working with our colleagues in BBC Arabic and BBC Monitoring to ascertain that accents and language are correct for the location. - Searching for the original source of the upload/sequences as an indicator of date. - Examining weather reports and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time. - Maintaining lists of previously verified material to act as reference for colleagues covering the stories. - Checking weaponry, vehicles and licence plates against those known for the given country. That's not an exhaustive list, but those are some of the most common things we do in BBC News.
Tom Johnson

Open Data Stories | About - 0 views

  • The challenge As noted in Open Data Stories’ first story, there are calls from various quarters for more data on the utility of governments releasing data and other material for re-use. The challenge would seem to be this: if people and organisations want governments to continue to invest in open data initiatives, they should jump into the feedback loop and tell governments, and the world, when they are putting open government data to good use. The scale or nature of beneficial use shouldn’t matter. It might be economic, creative, cultural or environmental. Or it could be something else. But tell us your story. Equally, interested stakeholders such as Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation can tell us their stories too, even if that is only drawing us to relevant (and openly licensed ) articles that we can repost on Open Data Stories. And, of course, agencies who see the data they steward being put to good use should tell us too. Whatever the case, share your stories with others. The more you do, the richer the feedback loop and that, in turn, is likely to enable open data policies to be better developed and refined and, ultimately, to be sustainable.
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    http://www.zanran.com/ a search engine for data & statistics. Time to open your data, people! #opendata
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