Investigative journalism in recent years is confronted with two major challenges: 1) vast amounts of unstructured data originating from large text collections such as leaks or answers to Freedom of Information requests, and 2) multi-lingual data due to intensified global cooperation and communication in politics, business and civil society. Faced with these challenges, journalists are increasingly cooperating in international networks. To support such collaborations, we present the new version of new s leak 2.0, our open-source software for content-based searching of leaks. It includes three novel main features: 1) automatic language detection and language-dependent information extraction for 40 languages, 2) entity and keyword visualization for efficient exploration, and 3) decentral deployment for analysis of confidential data from various formats. We illustrate the new analysis capabilities with an exemplary case study.
@cite_10 is a more advanced open-source application developed by computer scientists in collaboration with journalists to support investigative journalism. The application supports import of PDF, MS Office and HTML documents, document clustering based on topic similarity, a simplistic location entity detection, full-text search, and document tagging. Since this tool is already mature and has successfully been used in a number of published news stories, we adapted some of its most useful features such as document tagging and a keyword-in-context (KWIC) view for search hits. Furthermore, in we concentrate on intuitive and visually pleasing approaches to display extracted contents for a fast exploration of collections.
@cite_10
2027855569
For an investigative journalist, a large collection of documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request or a leak is both a blessing and a curse: such material may contain multiple newsworthy stories, but it can be difficult and time consuming to find relevant documents. Standard text search is useful, but even if the search target is known it may not be possible to formulate an effective query. In addition, summarization is an important non-search task. We present Overview , an application for the systematic analysis of large document collections based on document clustering, visualization, and tagging. This work contributes to the small set of design studies which evaluate a visualization system in the wild, and we report on six case studies where Overview was voluntarily used by self-initiated journalists to produce published stories. We find that the frequently-used language of exploring a document collection is both too vague and too narrow to capture how journalists actually used our application. Our iterative process, including multiple rounds of deployment and observations of real world usage, led to a much more specific characterization of tasks. We analyze and justify the visual encoding and interaction techniques used in Overview 's design with respect to our final task abstractions, and propose generalizable lessons for visualization design methodology.