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June 13, 2011 04:05 am

How Journalists Data-Mined the Wikileaks Docs

meckdevil writes "Associated Press developer-journalist extraordinaire Jonathan Stray gives a brilliant explanation of the use of data-mining strategies to winnow and wring journalistic sense out of massive numbers of documents, using the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks as a case in point. The concepts for focusing on certain groups of documents and ignoring others are hardly new; they underlie the algorithms used by the major Web search engines. Their use in a journalistic context is on a cutting edge, though, and it raises a fascinating quandary: By choosing the parameters under which documents will be considered similar enough to pay attention to, journalist-programmers actually choose the frame in which a story will be told. This type of data mining holds great potential for investigative revelation — and great potential for journalistic abuse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MNjBAxVnLxs/How-Journalists-Data-Mined-the-Wikileaks-Docs

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