Journalism and Storytelling

A rant. A common story told in journalism school is that what they teach is “storytelling” (for example, see Storytelling in journalism.) A couple of years ago I noticed that everytime I visited a communications programme or journalism programme I was told they were into the business of “storytelling” as if this was some deep discovery or a secret hidden from the rest of us. The implication was that initiates (journalism students) were taught to give up naive views of what they would learn inorder to learn creative writing. Journalism as a discipline told itself a story that excused it from such mundane challenges as understanding, accuracy and timeliness in order to become a creative art closely allied with public relations (otherwise known as propaganda.) They believed their own story and now we pay for it by having to read papers that are little more than collections of columns (where the columnist is the story), fictions (that entertain the reader), and editor’s reflections about the media (navel gazing.) Google News is the refreshing antidote – news (not stories) that is aggregated by algorithm (not storytelling). Read on for more ranting…
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In dialogue lies hope

The BBC has been hosting a hopeful dialogue between an Eygptian and Israeli woman. (See BBC NEWS | Middle East | Mid-East pen friends part 4: Shared land) Besides the hope that such conversations inspire in the face of the ordered murder both sides have fallen into, it is worth noting how this conversation works as a dialogue. Its power lies in its being witnessed – its being played out in public. The comments almost overwhelm the conversation – and in the public play conversation becomes dialogue.
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News Bursts

Daypop Top News Bursts is a site that lists clusters of news stories around word bursts. They don’t give the algorithm, but it seems to do something like what Google News does – provides clusters of stories that have similar subjects and which have a “heightened useage of certain words…”

Can this be used on a text? Could you treat a text with paragraphs as if each paragraph were a story in time. Sentences could be pulled that best show the heightened usage of words. Something like that…

notlong.org: Short URLs

A comment to a note on Annotations had an intriguing comment by Seb who has a blog at seb.notlong.org. I went there, and, because the server was busy it dropped me into the notlong.org site which provides simple service where people can get a short url created that resolves to their longer url. Thus XXX.notlong.org resolves to something entirely different. (Thanks Seb – this is the second note with something I have learned from him.)

See notlong Short URL Redirection: Make a long URL notlong. This suggests one could create a long term url that would travel with you like a life phone number. (What would I do with all my stuff at Mac if I left?)
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Network Fragments, Analysis of E-Mail

One emerging form of structured text analysis is the analysis of large corpora of e-mail. See Social Network Fragments and InFlow and Email Datamining. Both projects create visualizations of networks much as Steve Ramsay does with StageGraph.

An interesting question for TAPoR is whether we can build an aggregator that can build a corpus from e-mail that could be used by other tools.
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Research and SSHRC

I am the campus rep for the SSHRC Trasnformation exercise. (See my blog at Transforming Knowledge. Here is a flyer that was designed for the discussions here at Mac. (Download file) It is an example of how I am trying to move away from PowerPoint presentations following Tufte, “Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”. A well designed handout really works better (but it costs more.)