Institute for Analytic Journalism

The Evolution of Darwin's Ideas

analyticjournalism — 2009-09-07T11:55:04-06:00

FlowingData passes along the link to this fine piece of work by Ben Fry. "Ben Fry Visualizes the Evolution of Darwin’s Ideas" Journos could be using a similar approach to analyze the evolution of the ideas of public officials.

Ben Fry Visualizes the Evolution of Darwin’s Ideas

Posted by Nathan / Sep 7, 2009 to Artistic Visualization / 2 comments

"Ben Fry, well-known for Processing and plenty of other data goodness, announced his most recent piece, On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, made possible by The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

The visualization explores the evolution of Charles Darwin's theory of, uh, evolution. It began as a less-defined 150,000-word text in the first edition and grew and developed to a 190,000-word theory in the sixth edition.

Watch where the updates in the text occur over time. Chunks are removed, chunks are added, and words are changed. Blocks are color-coded by edition. Roll over blocks to see the text underneath.

As usual, excellent work, Mr. Fry."

Another class of workgroup tool

Tom Johnson — 2008-03-14T13:59:34-06:00

Increasingly, we find ourselves working on various workgroup projects here at the IAJ. And increasingly our project colleagues are widely scattered. Today, for example, we will be communicating with folks in Santa Fe, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and one guy who is attending a conference, possibly somewhere in the Ohio River Valley. We've have been using PBWiki for much of this work, but sometimes one just needs to literally see the other guy's digital desktop.

A report today from the always-helpful Internet Scout points us to:

TeamViewer 3.5.4011

http://www.teamviewer.com/download/index.aspx

If you are working with a friend on a joint project and he is in Houston and you are in Shanghai, what do you do? You could take a glance at TeamViewer, a program that allows for desktop sharing and file transfer. Visitors just need to run TeamViewer on both machines and the program can also be used to create and display presentations. This version is compatible with computers running Window 95 and newer.

If you're really serious about searching....

Tom Johnson — 2007-12-04T18:29:37-07:00

Deep Web Research 2008

http://www.llrx.com/features/deepweb2008.htm

By Marcus P. Zillman, Published on November 24, 2007

Printer-Friendly Version

Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators is a keynote presentation that I have been delivering over the last several years, and much of my information comes from the extensive research that I have completed over the years into the "invisible" or what I like to call the "deep" web. The Deep Web covers somewhere in the vicinity of 900 billion pages of information located through the world wide web in various files and formats that the current search engines on the Internet either cannot find or have difficulty accessing. Search engines currently locate approximately 20 billion pages.

In the last several years, some of the more comprehensive search engines have written algorithms to search the deeper portions of the world wide web by attempting to find files such as .pdf, .doc, .xls, ppt, .ps. and others. These files are predominately used by businesses to communicate their information within their organization or to disseminate information to the external world from their organization. Searching for this information using deeper search techniques and the latest algorithms allows researchers to obtain a vast amount of corporate information that was previously unavailable or inaccessible. Research has also shown that even deeper information can be obtained from these files by searching and accessing the "properties" information on these files.

This article and guide is designed to give you the resources you need to better understand the history of the deep web research, as well as various classified resources that allow you to search through the currently available web to find those key sources of information nuggets only found by understanding how to search the "deep web".

This Deep Web Research 2008 article is divided into the following sections:

Articles, Papers, Forums, Audios and Videos	Cross Database Search Services	Peer to Peer, File Sharing, Grid/Matrix Search Engines	Resources - Deep Web Research
Cross Database Articles	Cross Database Search Tools	Presentations	Bot Research Resources and Sites

ARTICLES, PAPERS, FORUMS, AUDIOS AND VIDEOS (Current and Historical)

Knowledge Management in the Newsroom

Tom Johnson — 2006-09-20T12:48:37-06:00

If you want to generate a glazed look of incomprehension in a audience of journalists, just ask, "How many of you work for an organization that has someone assigned to coordinate knowledge management throughout the company or at least for the newsroom?"

We're not talking about someone who acquires and coordinates databases, a task typically assigned to news researchers, but rather someone who studies what digital (or potentially digital ) data resources exist within the entire company and how might those be leveraged to generate new or better insights, stories and, possibly, revenue streams.

The first journalism-specific book on the topic came of Stephen Quinn, a professor at Deakin University in Australia. Quinn's book, "Knowledge Management in the Digital Newsroom," appeared in 2002 and draws examples from many U.S., European and Australian publications.

Now comes a similar work by a team led by Prof. Guy Berger that studied African newspapers of varying size and sophistication.

What the Newsroom Knows

Author/s: Weza et al.
Date Published: 31/08/2006
File: download (1554.115 KB)

Description: This book tracks the state-of-play in a selection of independent African newspapers, both big and small. It also points the way forward, with explanations of "convergence", "content management", and "enterprise management". In short, it shows what theories and systems of Knowledge Management can offer the African media.
For other titles, see: http://www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za/publications.cfm

We will be posting a review in coming days, but until then, go to the link above and download a copy for yourself. The download price is right -- free -- and doing so will save the mailing costs from Grahamstown, South Africa.