Last week, Govcom.org, the Amsterdam-based creator of info-political tools such as the IssueCrawler, celebrated its ten year anniversary. As part of the jubilee, a series of lectures called the ‘Amsterdam New Media Summer Talks: Networked Content’ was organized on August 11. The program, hosted by Richard Rogers, included talks by Warren Sack, Alexander Galloway, Greg Elmer and Anat Ben-David. As the theme suggests, the Summer Talks focused on the way Web-based content is organized, be it not from a user perspective, but by analyzing the way Web devices, such as crawlers and scrapers, actively affect content delivery. Co-organizer of the Summer Talks and the week-long workshop that followed, is the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) at Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. DMI aims to develop and display tools and methods for researching the ‘natively digital’, examples of which would be hyperlinks, threads and tags. The workshop was divided into four sub-themes; Studying Software, Cyberlands, Alternative Algorithms and Networked Content.
I took part in the Studying Software group (lead by Warren Sack) where we narrowed our focus to a device-centric study of news aggregators and alternative editorial processes. We worked towards defining a system that determined the geographic location of news sources surrounding a specific issue on Google News. Our aim was to explore whether geographical distance distinguishes significant differences of opinion. For instance, when discussing the issue of the Iraq War, is there a significant difference between French opinions and American opinions? Or, given the issue of “whaling” does the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., Norway, Japan) have a significantly different way of describing the issue than does the Southern Hemisphere?
The protocol we presented at the end of the week describes a process where the input is a query (of one or more search terms in Google News) and the output is a set of colored, geographical maps. The maps show the geographical locations where one query term, for instance “North Korea”, co-occurs with a certain secondary keyword, such as “reunification”, “human rights” or “nuclear”. For instance, if the query is “North Korea” the process might determine that “North Korea” frequently co-occurs with the noun “reunification” in the news sources of North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and China; co-occurs infrequently in Brazil; and, co-occurs not at all in the rest of the world. Then, the colored map might show most of Asia tinted orange with 100% opacity; Brazil tinted orange with 20% opacity; and the rest of the world left blank. The actual scripting and testing of the proposed tool may lead to further refinements and related uses, such as the possibility to zoom in on the world map in order to get to the local sources, or to follow the development of an issue over a period of time.
Other research projects and tools realized during the Jubilee Workshop:
Nomadic Citizenship: Palestinian Cyberland goes Web 2.0
IP Browser
The Vigilance of Wikipedians
Last Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.
