Towards Computational Journalism

Canberra.
I'll admit that I've skipped the ANZCA AGM to check out the (excellent) Museum of Australian Democracy in the front wing of Old Parliament House - well worth a visit, and I can now say that I've crossed the floor in both houses of parliament. The next session at ANZCA 2010, then, starts with a paper by Anna Daniel, whose focus is on computational journalism: a response to the changes in news consumption and production through the greater use of software and technologies that support journalistic work. The belief is that this approach can benefit the quality of journalistm, and in doing so set apart papers which use it from their competitors.

Key drivers of this are the shift to the digital economy, the increasing transparency of government information, and the ubiquity and power of available softwares. Examples for computational journalism are the Google-funded Sunlight Foundation in the US, which aims for 'one-click government transparency' by making available government and other datasets in more easily queriable formats; and the Guardian MP expenses site, operating as a platform for crowdsourcing research into MP expenses that allows journalists to focus on analysis, leads, verification and reportage (users are invited to examine and annotate the content of some 1 million expenses documents obtained under freedom of information legislation - 170,000 documents were annotated in the first 80 hours alone). In Australia, there's also Lobbylens, which tracks the interrelationships between governments, politicians, and lobbyists - though this is not computational journalism, but simply a tool for journalists.

In the UK, the Guardian mapped politicians' movements through the electorates as part of the 2010 general election campaign through a Google Maps site; in Australia, there's a Twitter map doing something (vaguely) similar for tweets about the next election. In the US, Everyblock maps housing affordability, social issues, news reports, and other data onto a map to give residents and potential residents an idea of the makeup of specific locations; in the UK, the Guardian also tracks Prince Charles's expenses and activities and uses this as input for its coverage of the Prince.

Technorati : ANZCA 2010, collaboration, computational journalism, crowdsourcing, data mashups, journalism
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