Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
This seems to be National Library Week at the IAJ. But we are especially in sympathy with the concerns raised by Victoria McCargar, associate technology editor at the Los Angeles Times, concerns she writes about in The Sybold Report addressing the issue “Following the Trail of the Disappearing Data.” The piece lays out the very real issues facing not just institutions of journalism but, we believe, the fabric of democracy. Though McCargar is talking about newspapers, her arguments should be applied to ALL journalism institutions. There's no reason — except short-sightedness — that broadcast operations have any less responsibility to maintaining information patrimony. (Well, maybe they do: they long ago dropped having real news operations because, gee, that would cut into shareholder returns.)
Elliott Parker, and the Journet listserv, tips us to a NewScientist.com report…. “Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor. “Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party’s policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. ” http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7210&feedId=online-news_rss20)–at Interesting perhaps in its nuance, but hardly new in concept. Here at the IAJ we've long been impressed with the work done at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory around “information visualization.” “Information Visualization is the direct visualization of a representation of selected features or elements of complex multi-dimensional data. Data that can be used to create a visualization includes text, image data, sound, voice, video – and of course, all kinds of numerical data.” See http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/about.html and http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html
As believers in the RRAW-P process well know, it all good journalism starts with the first “R” – Research. And good research starts with regular tips and pointers from professional researchers, a class to which journalists are usually adopted cousins. That’s why we look forward to Thursdays, when e-mail newsletters come from some of the best in the business.
GISCafe.com, an online magazine for the GIS community, recently established a site for “University GIS.” This includes a number of great tools for analytic journalists, not the least of which are syllabi for self-learning or running a training program in a newsroom, along with links to GIS experts around the nation who might be available as backstops on a GIS project.
The Boston Indicators Project, a joint effort of The Boston Foundation and the City of Boston, Massachusetts, used systems thinking in their 2002 report, Creativity & Innovation: A Bridge to the Future. The Foundation worked with systems thinking consultants (Daniel Aronson, Four Profit Inc; Phil Clawson, Community Matters Group; and Brendan Miller and Osamu Uehara of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to help find a core theme in the changes in the 200 indicators related to the greater Boston area's economic strength, civic life, community fabric, health status, diversity, and other areas. As a result, the report highlights the connections between economic innovation, transportation, the cost of living, diversity, demographics, and many other areas.
The following links provide general background information on the field of Cybernetics and Systems Theory, an interdisciplinary academic domain.
“People, when initially introduced to structures, also referred to as Archetypes, often find them a bit overwhelming. They really aren't at all difficult once you get used to them. The following is an introduction to structures and how to read the stories associated with the diagrams.” http://www.systems-thinking.org/intst/int.htm Be sure to work upstream in the URL to see the rest of Bellinger's work.
System Dynamics Society System dynamics is a methodology for studying and managing complex feedback systems, such as one finds in business and other social systems. In fact it has been used to address practically every sort of feedback system. While the word system has been applied to all sorts of situations, feedback is the differentiating descriptor here. Feedback refers to the situation of X affecting Y and Y in turn affecting X perhaps through a chain of causes and effects. One cannot study the link between X and Y and, independently, the link between Y and X and predict how the system will behave. Only the study of the whole system as a feedback system will lead to correct results.
SimVenture was developed by Vince Guiliani and his colleagues in the late '90. This PowerPoint is c. 2001.
