Some researchers in the Computer Science department (nary a journalists to be found) are doing some interesting work trying to determine the degree to which people in different regions talk about different things. The assumption is, obviously, that newspapers are a good proxy for what people are talking about. Still, some smart people are wrestling with interesting ways to understand journalism. Be sure to check out the published paper at http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/mehler/mypapers/heatmap.pdf
spatial analysis of news sources
21 December 2006
a large-scale news paper analysis system that is able to create "entity
datamaps", a spatial visualization of the interest in a given named
entity. the aim of this system is to identify entities which display
regional biases, by estimating the frequency of reference of an entity
in any given city.
entities likely to be geographically-biased include United States cities & local sports teams. entities likely to have little bias include foreign cities, country names, & national political figures. The text is acquired from about 800 US online newspaper sources.
see also mood news & what's up & news attention & vanishing point & newsquakes.
[link: sunysb.edu (pdf)]
