Institute for Analytic Journalism

Librarians and "IT Professionals" - Getting to the root of it all

analyticjournalism — 2008-11-14T15:56:21-07:00

Amy Disch, library director of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, sends along these links via the News Librarians' listserv (newslib@listserv.unc.edu). This is a gentle reminder about how the foundations of good publications today rest, first, on the integration of library AND IT skills.

Watch them in the order listed:

Putting Open Source tools to work for community reporting

Tom Johnson — 2008-06-13T13:20:45-06:00

The phrases "community journalism" and "convergence journalism" have been around for decades (in the case of the former) and at least 10 years in the case of the latter. For a long time, "community journalism" referred to the publishing of "...a small daily, 20,000 or less, or maybe a larger weekly or twice- or thrice-weekly." And "convergence" most often talked about using various print and Audio/Visual media to deliver the same old reportorial product of traditional newspapers and broadcast.

Finally, some are starting to see that the real and much-needed "convergence" has to be implemented on the front-end of the reportorial process. Paul Niwa, at Emerson College, has done just that with some graduate students who created bostonchinatown.org. And we are grateful to Niwa for writing a "how and why we did it" piece for the current issue of the Convergence Newsletter.

Here's Niwa's lede, but do check out the entire piece:

"Community Embraces a Converged Journalism-Sourcing Project

By Paul Niwa, Emerson College

Boston’s Chinatown is one of the largest and oldest Asian American neighborhoods in the country. Yet, this community of 40,000 does not even have a weekly newspaper. Coverage of the neighborhood in the city’s metropolitan dailies is also weak. In 2006, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald mentioned Chinatown in 78 articles. Only 16 percent of the sources quoted in those articles were Asian American, indicating that newspapers relied on information from non-residents to cover the neighborhood. With all this in mind, I created the bostonchinatown.org project as an experiment to build a common sourcebook for newsrooms."

Zotero: I think they've got it this time

Tom Johnson — 2007-10-05T13:15:49-06:00

Yes, call us fickle and lacking in loyalty when it comes to note-taking and research organization tools. Does anyone else remember the 5x8 cards with holes punched on all four perimeters? You entered "tags" or keywords by clipping out the outer edge of the hole, and when you needed to find a particular note card, a knitting needle-sized wire was inserted into the whole pack. Shake the cards and the desired note fell out. Sometimes.

Since going digital 25 years ago, we've tried dozens of tools to try and bring some order to what we've turned up online and need to save. Most were fine innovations and advances at the time, but there was often something that didn't quite meet all of our needs or desires. That still might be true, but a new entry in the research management derby (thanks to the cite from The Scout Report quoted below) delivers up an impressive new tool.

Zotero is a Firefox extension with rich, intuitive tools that are flexible enough to support the way YOU want/need to work. This is only version 1.0, but I think I have a new best friend.

Zotero

http://www.zotero.org/

"It can be hard to keep Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe straight at times, and if you are working on an academic paper that incorporates both of these august characters, you probably want to keep those research sources in good order. Thanks to Zotero, it is very easy to do just that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps users collect, manage, and cite their research sources. Zotero can automatically capture citation information from web pages, store PDF files, and also export these citations with relatively ease. This very helpful extension is compatible with computers running Firefox 2.0." [KMG]

The "Traditional Future" of library research

Tom Johnson — 2007-09-18T11:18:43-06:00

From O'Reilly Radar's Publishing blog comes this interesting item. See http://radar.oreilly.com/publishing/

The Traditional Future

"A prominent U.S. sociologist and student of professions, Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, has written a thought-provoking thesis on what he terms "library research" -- that is, research as performed with library-held resources by historians, et. al, via the reading and browsing of texts -- compared to social science research, which has a more linear, "Idea->Question->Data->Method->Result" type of methodology.

"The pre-print, "The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research," is full of insights about library centric research, including intriguing parallels between library research and neural net computing architectures; a comparison that made me think anew, and with more clarity, about how the science of history is conducted. Armed with a distinctive interpretation of library research, Abbott is able to draw some incisive conclusions about the ramifications of large repositories of digitized texts (such as Google Book Search) on the conduct of scholarship..."

Niche professsions doing the same thing journalists do

Tom Johnson — 2005-10-31T13:29:19-07:00

The premise of the IAJ is to discover find how other professions and academic disciplines do what we do as journalists. That is, how do they find and analyze data and then present the results of that analysis.

We recently subscribed (it's free) to Law Technology News. It's no surprise that the data management needs of large law offices are much the same as those of journalism organizations. Lawyers pretty much follow the RRAW-P process, too. So topics like Calendaring, Case Management, Contact Management, Document Management, Electronic Data Discovery (EDD) are right up our alley.

Law Technology News doesn't do much journalism, in fact it pretty much reprints press releases. But it does provide many, many pointers to products and methods related to journalism. Give it a look.
as well.

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Report

JTJ — 2005-04-07T10:47:42-06:00

The Search Engine Report is yet another valuable tool that serious researchers use as a "heads up" device. It's a monthly newsletter that covers developments in the search engine industry [Industry? Who would have thought it?] and changes to the Search Engine Watch web site, http://searchenginewatch.com/. You can subscribe at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/

GovTrack.us -- Good "alert" tool

JTJ — 2005-03-21T20:47:38-07:00

GovTrack.us is a free, publicly available, privately run, open-government-advocating web service in good company with such sites as Project Vote ...

Tracking federal legislation

JTJ — 2005-03-21T12:45:28-07:00

The good folks at LLRX.com supply a good pointer to .gov/legislation research

**The Government Domain: GovTrack.us: Under Development
http://www.llrx.com/columns/govdomain3.htm

Peggy ...

Initial published description of the RRAW-P process

JTJ — 2005-03-01T20:35:02-07:00

It was in the early '90s, when JTJ began thinking about and researching the process that results in the journalist's product. It eventually boiled down to the RRAW-P process: Research-->Reporting-->Analysis-->Writing and finally Publishing/Producing/Packaging. The attached paper first appeared in the Social Science Computer Review in 1994.