Paul Walmsley, a programming wiz at IRE, has developed a
neat PERL script for doing a bit of Social Network Analysis online at the IRE
site.

“JustLooking” is a members-only tool that has been up for a
year, Walmsley said, but lacking publicity, it’s been pretty much
backstage.  The app is a relatively
basic, yet impressive tool whose results are designed to be integrated/imported
into UCInet, an early SNA tool.

“JustLooking” comes, so far, with two network templates to
save time in common situations.
  * Campaign Finance:
for tracking campaign dollars
  * Rolodex: for
entering basic networks of people and organizations

 Dig out your IRE membership number and check it out.

We were glad to see the release last week of the Carnegie/Knight
foundations' executive summary of their study, “Improving
The Education Of Tomorrow's Journalists.”  It’s often a good
sign when financial heavyweights like these organizations recognize there is a
problem and change needs to be forthcoming. 

And we are grateful the study’s conclusion reports that journalists need
to be trained to have greater analytic abilities.  This study, for
example, goes so far as to say, “Developing news judgment and analytical skills,
including the ability to separate fact from opinion and use
statistics   But the report, at least the summary,
fails to break any new ground (the Carnegie Foundation has tried
this before, at least with the J-school at Columbia Univ.) in articulating
just which statistics some or all journalists should be using.” 
(This is no surprise: the Accrediting Council on Education in
Journalism and Mass Communications, the accrediting body for journalism
education, says students should be able to “apply basic
numerical and statistical concepts,” but then fails to describe criteria an
accrediting team could use to measure that objective.)

But and but….

First, we are struck by the U.S.-centric perspective of the
study.  Yes, yes, “five leading U.S. research
universities with journalism schools.”  And, after all, Carnegie
and the Knight family made their fortunes in the U.S.  But the
Digital Revolution is global, and so should be many aspects of journalism
education and practice. 
Japanese police, for example, use the same numerals in their GIS systems
as do the Brits or Brazilians.  Ergo, journalists in all nations
need to know things like how GIS is being applied in their jurisdictions to
“monitor the centers of power” or understand and illustrate a variety of
phenomena.

Second, as much as we would like to take comfort in this research
effort, we can only conclude that it’s the same old Classic
Journalists talking to each other.  Consider this: 
The summary lists 40 individuals interviewed for the report. 
Any American journalist or journalism educator will recognize most of the
names because they are all high-profile individuals of a certain age,
individuals deeply invested in, it would seem, practicing and perpetuating
classic journalism, i.e. pre-Digital Age journalism.  (There is a
handful of major exceptions, people who have either been deeply involved in
practicing journalism in the new infosphere or learning to leverage the new
environment:  Michael Bloomberg, James Fallows, Richard Kaplan,
Donald E. Newhouse, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.)

But by talking to 40 mostly high-profile types, along with these five
deans, what specific directions for change in journalism are likely to
result?  If the study’s efforts were thorough, interviewees would
have included people entrenched in managing information and data in the digital
infosphere.  People like Dave Winer, one of the early
inventors of blogging software, or Craig Newmark of “Craig’s List” or Andy Lehren at
NBC Dateline or Dan Gillmor,
formerly of the San Jose Mercury-News, or Rich
Meislin at The New York Times or just about anyone at Google.  All of these
people are changing the way journalism is practiced and delivered.

Third, we are taken aback by the rationale for the “Summer
Institute at ABC News” internships.  We can’t follow the logic
here.  We are told that all forms of journalism are in trouble in
terms of quality and readership/viewership.  Yet this initiative is
sending 10 carefully selected students into one of the very places that is in
trouble, ostensibly to learn something.  Huh? 

These students, and the future of journalism, would be far better served
if the ten were given financial support to spend a summer working as an
administrative assistant to a city manager in a medium-sized city; spend a
summer working with a crime analyst in a major city police department; spend a
summer working as an aide in the congressional IT division office; spend a
summer working in the field with Oxfam or Catholic Charities or similar
organizations; spend a summer working at Community Viz to learn how simulation
modeling can generate insights and tell stories; spend a summer working at WHO
or the CDC to learn how data is collected and analyzed.  Then, at
the end of the summer, have those students submit a how-to-implement-the-process
paper describing what they learned that can be applied to journalism and how
those lessons and skills could be taught in J-school.

Finally, we are concerned that the study seems to look at
journalism education as a unique species without appropriate attention to the
information environment, the rapidly changing environment, in which the species
lives.  On one hand, Hodding Carter III, president of the Knight
Foundation, seems to recognize the change:  “Virtually
everything in journalism is, at the moment, insufficient and in a state of
flux,” he said. “Basic principles do not change, but the environment in which
they must be applied is changing radically. So should the education of those who
must work within that environment.“  Yet the report of the
study so far doesn’t address these changing-environment issues in any specific
manner.

We hope that in the next phase, the foundations and deans consider
investigating issues like these:

· 
What proportion of a J-faculty has participated in a research
project in the past 24 months involving colleagues in other disciplines on the
same campus?  Or colleagues in other disciplines from any other
campus?  And how did those interdisciplinary participants organize and manage
the project in the digital environment?

·  What proportion of the J-faculty subscribes to listservs other
than those for their department, school or university?  If the
number is between one and six, how many of those are related to academic
disciplines other than journalism? 

·  What proportion of the J-faculty has attended a scholarly
conference in the past 24 months related to a discipline other than
journalism?

·   What proportion of the J-faulty has used a spreadsheet or database
to analyze data pertaining to a story the faculty member worked on or used a
spreadsheet or database to build a mini data base for personal or department
use?  What proportion of the J-faculty teaching writing or editing
courses have taught students to use a spreadsheet or database to analyze data
related to a story?

·  What proportion of the J-faculty has downloaded or installed a
computer utility in the past three months, just to see how it works and to
explore how it might be helpful to journalists?

          · 
What proportion of the J-faculty have posted their course syllabi
and calendars to a website, one designed to facilitate communication between and
among faculty and students?  What proportion of the J-faculty
typically expects their students to always submit written and imagery
assignments in digital form and via e-mail or similar
tools?

We do hope something comes out of this
initiative, but it’s taken two or three years to get to this point. 
Can democracy afford to wait much longer?

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.”

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.

From the good ol' Librarians'
Index to the Internet comes a good site/toolbox for learning and teaching
stats.

“The Claremont Colleges' “Web
Interface for Statistics Education” (WISE) seeks to expand
teaching resources offered through Introductory Statistics courses, especially
in the social sciences. This project aims to develop an on-line teaching tool
to take advantage of the unique hypertextual and presentational benefits of the
World Wide Web (WWW). This teaching tool's primary application is as a
supplement to traditional teaching materials, addressing specific topics that
instructors have difficulty in presenting using traditional classroom
technologies. The tool serves to promote self-paced learning and to provide a
means for advanced students to review concepts.”

Once in a great while, a scholarly event occurs that, at least in hindsight, was a milestone in the sociology of knowledge.  In modern times we have seen the 1975 Asilomar Conference on safety and regulation of recombinant DNA technologies, for example.

This
past March 15-16, 2005, a National Science Foundation-sponsored
conference was held outside of Washington, D.C. that, 20 years hence,
might prove to be a similar milestone.  While
apparently there were no journalists participating, it was a meeting
with great portent for us, especially those journalists who consider
their best work to be a solid social science endeavor.

The conference was called: “SBE/CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for the Social Sciences.”  Glossary time: “SBE” means “Social, Behavioral, and Economics.”  “CISE” means “Computer & Information Science & Engineering.”  Cyberinfrastructure?  Well, you can figure that one out.

The workshop concept:

“Cyberinfrastructure
is the coordinated aggregate of software, hardware and other
technologies, as well as human expertise, required to support current
and future discoveries in science and engineering. The challenge of
Cyberinfrastructure is to integrate relevant and often disparate
resources to provide a useful, usable, and enabling framework for
research and discovery characterized by broad access and “end-to-end”
coordination.

Today,
most Cyberinfrastructure efforts are focused on the development and
integration of Cyberinfrastructure technologies and resources. Fewer
efforts have focused on the immense repercussions of the social
dynamics and organizational, policy, management and administration
decisions inherent in developing and deploying Cyberinfrastructure.
Such choices, and the social, cultural, and behavioral impacts of how
we develop, manage, and evolve Cyberinfrastructure will be critical to
its success.

“Recommendations and Challenges

·        Summary
Recommendation 1: Develop and deploy enabling data-oriented
Cyberinfrastructure targeted to the social and behavioral sciences.

·        Summary
Recommendation 2: Develop and deploy targeted toolkits, virtual, and
computational environments for facilitating social and behavioral
science research.

·        Summary
Recommendation 3: Instrument and design technologies to gather and
provide key data for social scientists. Conversely, utilize human and
computer interaction data to instrument and design Cyberinfrastructure
technologies.

·        Summary
Recommendation 4: Ensure that confidentiality, privacy, and other
social and policy considerations are included as part of the
architecture of Cyberinfrastructure.

·        Summary
Recommendation 5: Involve social and behavioral scientists in the
design of organizational frameworks, incentive structures,
collaborative environments, decision-making protocols, and other social
aspects of Cyberinfrastructure.

·        Summary
Recommendation 6: Develop adequate funding models for
Cyberinfrastructure that will enable social and behavioral science
research.

·        Summary
Recommendation 7: Develop explicit venues for funding
inter-disciplinary SBE and CISE research on the social impacts of
Cyberinfrastructure.

·        Summary
Recommendation 8: Develop the community for Cyberinfrastructure and
Social Sciences through targeted funding programs, meetings, workshops,
conferences, and other activities.”

Read
through these recommendations, replacing word like “social and
behavioral science” with “journalism,” and we would have a good mission
statement for what we must do in the next 20 years.  I encourage you to read the well-written final report of Cyberinfrastructure meeting.  Yes, parts will seem esoteric to the reporters being pushed to turn out four news stories and a Sunday feature every day.  But we hope that at least some editors with the vision thing and some journalism educators will read it and try to climb aboard the Cyberinfrastructure train.

We've been using a variety of web-based bookmarking tools for the past four or five years, tools like the now-departed Blink and Backflip.  They were all OK (so long as they remained financially viable), but never quite seemed to meet all our needs.  Recently, though, we learned about Furl (www.furl.net) and we like what we see.  Furl is in beta, so we don't know what the ultimate price will be, but journalists will like the ease with which we can pull URLs off a web page, markup those savings with keywords, copy-and-paste webpage annotations and then save the citation in a folder of your making.  Oh yeah, you can also save and e-mail the link(s) to anyone.  In fact, we like Furl so much, we will be demo-ing it next week at the IRE conference in Denver.

Television's effect on the courtroom

A critical look at what has been called the CSI effect

It can. 

The NYT this morning tells us that “Big News Media Join in Push to Limit Use of Unidentified Sources.”  Readers are told:

“Concerned that they may have become too free in granting anonymity to sources, news organizations including USA Today, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News and The New York Times are trying to throttle back their use.
     “But
some journalists worry that these efforts could hamper them from doing
their jobs – coming in a hothouse atmosphere where mistrust of the news
media is rampant, hordes of newly minted media critics attack every
misstep on the Web, and legal cases jeopardize their ability to keep
unnamed news sources confidential….
     “Last year, The New York Times adopted a more stringent approach to its
treatment of confidential sources, including a provision that the
identity of every unidentified source must be known to at least one
editor. A committee of the paper's journalists recently recommended
that the top editors put in place new editing mechanisms to ensure that
current policies are enforced more fully and energetically.”

We look forward to these “new editing mechanisms.”

Yes, policies on unnamed sources should be made,
those policies should be clear and everyone in the newsroom should know
what they are.  But more often (as in “every day”), editors must
know the sources — indeed, all sources
— are for a story, how to reach those souces and how to verify what
the reporter wrote, even if the reporter is out-of-pocket. 

This is not difficult if journalists recognize that a
PC-based word processing application already has the tools to assist in
this “Who Are The Sources” mission. (If the publication is still using
something like the old Coyote terminals, sorry, we probably can't
help  you.) 

The tool is the “comment” function in the word processor.  While the newsroom is making policies about sourcing, add this one: “Every
paragraph of every story will end with an embedded comment.  That
comment will show editors exactly how the reporter knows what he or she
just wrote.”  The comment might include a source's name,
phone number and date-time-place of interview.  The comment might
include a URL or a bibliographic citation.  It might include
reference to the specific reporter's notebook.  But in the end,
the comments should be sufficient that an editor can “walk the cat
backward” to determine exactly how the reporter knows what he/she just
wrote.  Doing so helps prevent unwarranted assumptions and errors
of fact, if not interpretation.

There will be those of the Burn-Your-Notes School of
libel defense who will contend this is comment thing is suicidal. 
We would suggest, first, that very few stories ever become court
cases.  Secondly remember that truth is the first defense in libel
actions, and it is our responsibility to deliver that truth.

NYTimes science writer Gina Kolata publishes an interesting
– and for her, atypical – story Sunday related to content analysis and the
integration of statistical and graphic tools. 
(See “Enron
Offers An Unlikely Boost To E-Mail Surveillance.”)The data under the digital
microscope?  One and a half million
e-mails sent by the good folks at Enron that were posted to the Web in 2003 by
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 



She writes: 

“Scientists had long
theorized that tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns within a group
over time – without ever actually reading a single e-mail – could reveal a lot
about what that group was up to.  For
example, would they be able to find the moment when someone's memos, which were
routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began
generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new
person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out,
and correlate it with something significant?

There may be commercial uses for the same techniques. For
example, they may enable advertisers to do word searches on individual e-mail
accounts and direct pitches based on word frequency.”

Gee, scientists doing the theorizing?  Advertisers doing word searches?  Might not “tracking the e-mailing and word
usage patterns” be a good tool for journalists to think about using?  Are there any journalism departments out
there teaching anything about applied content analysis?  It appears so.  At least Mark Miller, formerly of the University of Tennessee, was doing so a decade ago.  And there are some other interesting attempts, here  and here by the Project
for Excellence in Journalism.  But it appears nothing as
methodologically sophisticated as that carried out by the computer
scientists and political scientists is being done by journalists.

Last week, NOAA predicated a serious hurricane season a'comin' in the Atlantic, which has implications for the entire U.S. East Coast.  That's last week's
news, but if one lives in California, Mexico, Central America or Japan,
then today there's always the possibility of a major shaker.  And
those are just risks imposed by nature.  Modeling these and other
hazards of life is the mission of RMS, a fascinating California company demonstrating innovative thinking and analytic tools.

“RMS brings together a unique, multidisciplinary team of experts to
create solutions for its clients’ natural hazard and financial risk
management challenges. We are the technical leader in our market, with
over 100 engineers and scientists devoted to the development of risk
models. Of this number, approximately fifty percent hold advanced
degrees in their field of expertise.

Our specialists track research among leading experts and academic
institutions worldwide, and supplement this knowledge with internal R&D
to ensure that our models provide the most complete and accurate
quantification of risk.”

Yup — our kind of guys.  Examples of the output of these “risk models” can be found here.  Of special interest to U.S. journalists are the Catastrophe Risk maps.  (They are a bit too small to read in detail, but big enough to get the gist of some of the RMS product.)

We hope to report more next week about RMS, how it does what it does and how there might be some synergy there for analytic journalists.