Idea Lab

How the AP's Overview Turns Documents Into Pictures

by Jonathan Stray
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets -- beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. Same documents, different visualizations There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering. The first is the items plot, which grew out of the proof-of-concept system we presented a year ago. Every document is a dot. Similar documents get pulled together to form visible groups, that is, clusters. All the dots start grey, but become...

• May 24, 2012
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Public Lab's Keys to Developing Low-Cost Science Tools

by Adam Griffith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This piece was co-written by Mathew Lippincot. The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science community is a massive petri dish for low-cost science tools. Our balloon-mapping tool is in its mature phase having evolved out of the agar during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This success was due in large part to the feedback provided by the community of tool users and consumers of tool data and their revisions to the tool. As we've broadened our development, we've asked, how can this success be replicated with other low-cost science tools still in the petri dish? Rather than looking...

• May 22, 2012
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Top 12 Social Technologies from MIT Media Lab and Beyond

by J. Nathan Matias

During my work on Social Mirror, tablet tech for social checkups, I have been inspired by other amazing Media Lab social technologies. Here are 12 of the projects which I have found most inspiring, including one or two from other universities. Did I miss a project you love? Post your favorites in the comments. Social Empowerment through Networks Can social checkups empower marginalized teenagers? In 2001, Leo Burd, now a researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media, conducted several paper-based studies at Computer Clubhouse, with positive results. Leo is now an adviser on the Social Mirror software. Leo Bonnani's...

• May 21, 2012
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Knight Lab Aggregates News, Tweets Around NATO Coverage

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

World leaders, diplomats and hundreds of journalists -- as well as protesters with a wide range of grievances -- are coming to Chicago this week because of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATOinChicago.com, a new project from the Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University, aims to help people make sense of what's happening. The site has launched with two major components: What sites are saying: An aggregation of top news sources from around the world, allowing users to see how news media in different countries are reporting on NATO and the summit. What tweets are saying: A...

• May 18, 2012
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The State Decoded Turns Laws Inside Out

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Semantically, legal codes are smooth, shapeless balls of text. They're programmatically inaccessible, useless to software -- and most people. There's simply nothing on which to get a purchase. As qualitative data, they're inaccessible to quantitative analysis. This is the problem that the State Decoded project seeks to solve. The State Decoded's job is to turn legal codes inside out, bringing their substructures to the surface to make them understood more easily. By reducing laws to their smallest possible units, indexing them via every possible metric, and exposing all of those internal structures, it's possible to give people and software alike...

• May 16, 2012
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OpenCourt: When Is Intent a Criminal Act?

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Traditional media organizations cover big cases, and they do it well. Part of what's neat about streaming normal courtroom proceedings as a part of OpenCourt's efforts is being present for the interesting hearings that would otherwise fall through the cracks. For instance, in a scene about a week ago that echoed a plot line from the film "Minority Report," a local defense attorney moved that a charge against his client should be dismissed on grounds the state would essentially be criminalizing a state of mind. Both sides in the case agree the defendant, charged with attempt to commit a...

• May 15, 2012
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How to Decode State Law Histories

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A rich source of information about laws is found in the history data that accompanies each law in most states, but you've probably never noticed it. For example, Virginia's Freedom of Information Act has a series of exemptions spelled out in § 2.2-3705.1 which has a cryptic series of numbers listed below the law, in the section titled "History": 1999, cc. 485, 518, 703, 726, 793, 849, 852, 867, 868, 881, § 2.1-342.01; 2000, cc. 66, 237, 382, 400, 430, 583, 589, 592, 594, 618, 632, 657, 720, 932, 933, 947, 1006, 1064; 2001, cc. 288, 518, 844, § 2.2-3705;...

• May 14, 2012
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How FrontlineSMS Users Could Monitor Kenya's 2013 Elections

by Florence Scialom
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The FrontlineSMS user community has seen a growing number of user meet-ups across the world in recent months. It's exciting to see community members come together and share opinions and experiences on our software. This is a guest column by FrontlineSMS user Joseph Owuondo, who attended a recent meet-up in Nairobi hosted at the FrontlineSMS offices. The FrontlineSMS meet-up held in Nairobi at the beginning of April brought together a number of organizations, individuals and experts who focus their work on elections and conflict resolution-related issues -- and who all have an interest in the potential use of FrontlineSMS for...

• May 10, 2012
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ROFLCon Attendees Get a Memes Blast From the Past

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's 2012. Nerds are in, and Internet memes can actually make you famous IRL. But way back in 2000, things were different. YouTube didn't exist, and a video had to be sent around as an email attachment. (Remember RealPlayer?) Your mom yelled at you for tying up the phone line, and GeoCities plastered banners all over your creations. At ROFLCon, the past was well-represented during a recent presentation by Eric Wu of Eric Conveys an Emotion (founded in 1998); Zblofu of Zombocom; and Jonti Picking of Weebl's Stuff. They were all online in the '90s, but things really exploded in...

• May 9, 2012
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How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post also appeared in the Association of Independent's in Radio monthly AIRBlast. I first started working with independent producer Kara Oehler in 2005. Almost a day didn't pass without her telling me about something that happened on the "AIRDaily" listserve. I'd been on listservs before, but I had never actually talked to other people about them. These conversations with Kara were my introduction to the network of more than 800 makers brought together by AIR. At the time, I was living in New York but was partially still in Berlin, where I was completing the multimedia...

• May 8, 2012
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