We’re forever on the hunt for emerging technology and tools that we think could play an interesting part in the work we do for our clients; tools such as Overview, which we’ve trailed on a number of our client projects. After teaming up with , the Overview project lead, on a couple of events both in the UK and US in 2012 and 2013 we helped to provide feedback on the interface and data-mining features of the tool, and build a test-case on how Overview could be used in a business environment rather than purely journalistically.
We’re huge fans of text analysis that can help to detect interesting topics and trends, and a tool that’s most recently popped up on our radar is Dataminr For News, which coincidentally, like Overview, was also created with journalists in mind.
For this particular project Dataminr have teamed up with CNN and Twitter. CNN who have piloted the tool, which Dataminr’s CEO, Ted Bailey says will “alert journalists to information that’s emerging on Twitter in real time”, have said it has already helped them spot stories and find eye-witness accounts over the past few weeks.
In layman’s terms, the tool looks at tweets based on a number of filters/factors and then these are put through our best friend, the algorithm, to select the important ones that are then alerted to the journalist.
The battle of the newsrooms to not only jump on that big piece of breaking news – Twitter being the obvious place for this form of citizen journalism – but to also verify the authenticity is critical. Just a reminder that there are in excess of 500 million tweets sent out every day, so this is no mean feat, and something guys like Storyful have been doing for some time now – albeit with an emphasis on the ‘human algorithm’.
As with many tools that mine conversation and information across online social networks, we can immediately see how they could be seriously valuable in the work we do for our clients.
We’ve put in a demo request with Dataminr, so assuming we get the go-ahead, we’ll have a good poke around and report back our thoughts.
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