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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.

Europe's One-Stop Shop on Public Sector Information (PSI) Re-useWorking to Stimulate PSI Re-use The aim of the ePSIplatform is to strenghthen community, stimulate action, report developments and monitor progress towards a stronger and more transparent environment for the growth of national and European PSI re-use markets. Interactive One-Stop Shop News about European and International PSI re-use Developments Emerging Good Practices Examples of New PSI Re-use Products and Services Information about Legal cases on PSI Re-use Discussion, Communication and Information Sharing across the European PSI community Expert PSI Community Meetings (two meetings per year) Guest Bloggers from the European PSI Community PSI Topic Reports - Analytical Briefings on PSI Re-use (across sectors and issues) PSI Re-use Resources What is PSI re-use? - background information - the European PSI Re-use Directive translated into 27 EU languages and European Commission Communication on Re-use of PSI Directive (language variants) (May 2009) plus other key links and resources.

Europeana Linked Open Data The data.europeana.eu pilot is part of Europeana's ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other. The data is represented in the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and the described resources are addressable and dereferencable by their URIs - for instance, http://data.europeana.eu/item/09404/C3C50BD0958EE18ECE1B8F93780DC84D8273664F leads either to an HTML page on the Europeana portal for the object it identifies or to raw, machine-processable data on this object. Disclaimer: data.europeana.eu is currently in pilot stage, and can thus be changed at any moment! Your feedback is more than welcome, and may lead to updates in the prototype service. What's in here for you? data.europeana.eu currently contains metadata on 3.5 million texts, images, videos and sounds gathered by Europeana. These objects come from content providers who have reacted early and positively to Europeana's initiative of promoting more open data and new data exchange agreements. These collections come from 10 direct Europeana providers encompassing around 300 cultural institutions from 17 countries. They cover a great variety of heritage objects, such as this 18th-century view of a German landscape from the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, or Neil Robson's memories of the herring business from the Tyne and Wear Archives & Museums. For more information, see our datasets page.

ELAN description ELAN is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources. With ELAN a user can add an unlimited number of annotations to audio and/or video streams. An annotation can be a sentence, word or gloss, a comment, translation or a description of any feature observed in the media. Annotations can be created on multiple layers, called tiers. Tiers can be hierarchically interconnected. An annotation can either be time-aligned to the media or it can refer to other existing annotations. The textual content of annotations is always in Unicode and the transcription is stored in an XML format. ELAN provides several different views on the annotations, each view is connected and synchronized to the media playhead. Up to 4 video files can be associated with an annotation document. Each video can be integrated in the main document window or displayed in its own resizable window. ELAN delegates media playback to an existing media framework, like Windows Media Player, QuickTime or JMF (Java Media Framework). As a result a wide variety of audio and video formats is supported and high performance media playback can be achieved. ELAN is written in the Java programming language and the sources are available for non-commercial use. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Capturing human rights data in Analyzer Human rights groups collect data containing details of human right abuses from various sources, including medical records, newspaper articles, witness testimonies, letters, interviews, and official reports and documents. Analyzer can be used to capture this data for analysis. Data is coded according to the "Who did what to whom" model and entered into the capture set of Analyzer. Data about the source of the information is entered in the source tab, shown in Figure 1. (Note: the data in the figures shown here, unless otherwise indicated, are from a sample, not an actual, dataset.)

International Dataset Search View View Source Description:  The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) is a linked data application based on metadata scraped from an increasing number of international dataset catalog websites publishing a rich variety of government data. Metadata extracted from these catalog websites is automatically converted to RDF linked data and re-published via the TWC LOGD SPAQRL endpoint and made available for download. The TWC IOGDC demo site features an efficient, reconfigurable faceted browser with search capabilities offering a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlights the potential for useful linked data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide. Warning: This demo will crash IE7 and IE8. Contributor: Eric Rozell Contributor: Jinguang Zheng Contributor: Yongmei Shi Live Demo:  http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search Notes: This is an experimental demo and some queries may take longer time to response (30 ~60 seconds). Please referesh this page if the demo is not loaded. Our metadata model can be accessed here . Procedure to getting and publishing metadata is described here . The RDF dump of the datasets can be downloaded here. Welcome to S2S! International OGD Catalog Search (searching 736,578 datasets)