Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Steven Roth was one of those guys who could see farther than most of us and, even more rare, make that vision a reality. He died in his sleep this past weekend in his home near Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obit sub-hed: “One of the pioneers in field of 'information visualization' a 'reluctant manager' http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05165/521102.stm Roth was a founder of Maya Viz Ldt., one of the more interesting firms to emerge from the Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s. Maya Viz took infographics to higher levels of graphic clarity and data interaction.
“Described as 'dreamer,' a 'visionary' and most often, 'incredibly passionate' by his colleagues, Mr. Roth was probably best known for his oft-spoken desire to 'change the world' by developing software that allowed complex data and numerical information to be represented graphically, and in a way that humans could better see, use and manipulate it.”
Kudos to Dan Eggen, Julie Tate and Derek Willis for asking the basic question this week: “What do we know and how do we know it?” When that process is applied to White House claims about the value of the Patriot Act in fighting terrorists, the WH looks a little gray. And all it took was some digging of the data, followed by counting, to help set the record state. See: U.S. Campaign Produces Few Convictions on Terrorism Charges:Statistics Often Count Lesser Crimes“
Here's one of those online sites that will keep us browsing for hours. “Information Aesthetics” weblog says it's about “form follows data – towards creative information visualiztion.” Indeed so. How about links to:
The principles are here showing how creative journalism might deliver pertinent data/information to the people. Information Aesthetics is updated often.
James Fallows column in Sunday's NYT discusses some of the frustration with keyword searching and the El Dorado of having search engines “just answer my question.” Fallows points specifically to work to develop Aquaint. The CIA, NSA and similar federal organizations are apparently quite interested in the approach initially developed at Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab. Of deeper interest to serious researchers (or search-tool forecasters) than Fallows' column might be the lab's research papers.
There were multiple sessions at last week's IRE convention related to online research methods and tools, reflecting the constantly dynamic nature of that activity for journos.
We recently were referred to RDN's “Virtual Training Site.” It's mission: “The Internet is a rich source of information for students, lecturers and researchers. The RDN Virtual Training Suite tutorials teach the key information skills for the Internet environment. Learn how to use the Internet to help with your coursework, literature searching, teaching and research.“ The site's organization is uncommonly arranged by topic and academic discipline instead of search engines. While there is no category for journalism, per se, many of the disciplines we utilize are there and worth a look. There are some fine tools here for educators, both in the classroom and the newsroom.
Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, and a regular contributor to the Seattle Times editorial pages, suggests that today's journalism students lack the right stuff to do difficult reporting. In “The hardscrabble roots of investigative journalism,” he says: “Journalism students, at least in my experience, are less interested in hard-scrabble reporting and more interested in supporting roles.” He also says: “…The cost of uncovering a big story can be stupendous, often involving lawyers and computer experts as well as reporters, photographers and editors.
Most papers would rather spend the money on airplane tickets to cover their region's NFL or NBA teams, or so entertainment writers can make pilgrimages to Hollywood. These investments are more likely to attract readers, which in turn attract advertising dollars. The intensely bottom-line newspaper chains rarely appear on the honor roll, but always appear at the top of the profit-margin charts.
More of these investigative awards are won through the use of computer-assisted reporting, often involving the use of complex databases. A prize-winning team typically includes at least one journalist who specializes in this work, and often another who specializes in displaying the product graphically.”
It's good to see the word “taxonomy” creeping into the newsroom. And the AP is looking for someone who can make them. Here's the job posting: TAXONOMY DEVELOPER The Associated Press New York, NY
In a rapidly evolving technological environment, the Taxonomy Developer will collaborate with journalists, technologists, product specialists and news librarians to coordinate taxonomy creation, development and maintenance across media types and products, with the goal of aiding in the efficient retrieval and distribution of information.
The Taxonomy Developer for the Associated Press will develop taxonomies as well as create the taxonomy management and implementation strategy for AP's content delivery.
Responsibilities The taxonomy developer will help define overall AP Taxonomy Integration Strategy for content classification, delivery and user experience; work with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on editorial, technical and product teams to develop taxonomy implementation, process and management strategy; and help evaluate and work with appropriate tools for taxonomy management, data collection/analysis and surfacing of new terminology.
In addition, duties will include selection and prioritization of appropriate taxonomy domains. This includes developing taxonomies for new and existing products; selecting allowed values lists for proper names, products and companies; creating extensions and qualifiers to integrate AP's taxonomic scheme to external standards (ISO, SIC/NAICS, etc.); and working with and extending NewsML, IPTC News Codes and NITF. This person will work closely with the editorial, technical and product teams ensuring the taxonomies are usable and will develop and manage automated, semi-automated and manual processes for gathering taxonomy data, including adding terms, synonyms, aliases and new relation types as needed.
The Taxonomy Developer will work as part of a dynamic, multi-disciplinary team that is creating multimedia news and information products for AP and bringing them to market.
Qualifications include: 1) familiarity with industry standards groups, such as ISO, SIC/NAIC, 2) understanding structural metadata standards for content classes and entity extraction, 3) ability to validate usability of taxonomies with internal user groups (editorial teams) as well as external audiences, 4) expertise with taxonomy management and data collection/analysis, 5) surfacing of new terminology, 6) familiarity with Search and Auto Classification tools (Autonomy http://www.autonomy.com/content/home/ and Teragram http://www.teragram.com/); Text extraction tools (InXight http://www.inxight.com/); Taxonomy/Ontology maintenance tools (SchemaLogic http://www.schemalogic.com/ and Teragram http://www.teragram.com/)
MLIS degree or 3 years experience preferred.
For consideration, please send cover letters and resumes to taxonomy@apjobs.org
The Associated Press is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.
Interesting article on The Virtual Chase, a web site dedicated to “teaching legal professionals how to do research.” For the details, see “”How To Conduct a Background Check.”
Old friend and old pro Pat Stith has a fine essay on the Poynter Institute site, “A Guide to Computer Assisted Reporting — Tips and tales of investigative journalism.” Read it, and then pass it along to colleagues in your newsroom.
One of the interesting challenges for journalists and public health professionals is figuring out how to compare, and visualize, health care statistics in a demographic and geographic environment. Yeah, that's one of the things that epidemologists are supposed to do every day. But it ain't easy. In the current issue of ArcUser, Chakib Battioui, of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, has written an interesting article on “Calculating Health Disparity Indexes.” “Socioeconomic indexes are strongly believed to be associated with the risk of disease. However, there is no consensus in the United States regarding which area-based measure should be used to assess socioeconomic inequalities in health…. “To study the relationship between the rate of cervical cancer and economic status, the project used the Socio Economic Risk Index (SERI). SERI classifies people in public databases based on residential neighborhood characteristics and permits the calculation of population-based rates stratified by location…. “There are technical and conceptual obstacles to the adoption of area-based measures for public health. Currently, there is no consensus in the United States regarding which area-based measures should be used and what level of geography should be used to measure or monitor socioeconomic inequalities in health.”
The article is worth checking out because of the methodology's potential for application to other types of data.
Better Access to Public Health Infomation The same issue of ArcUser also carries an article by our old friend Bill Davenhall, of ESRI. His topic is as broad as the sub-hed above, but the accompanying map is especially interesting. Its caption: “Facing a flu vaccine shortage for the 2004-2005 flu season, Nebraska public health officials rapidly determined both the current vaccine supply and the anticipated demand using GIS.”
We're told that there might well be another flu vaccine shortage this coming winter. Heads up journos are starting to think now about how to cover — and illustrate — THAT story.
