Last month saw the launch of a new research facility for journalists by Google. The facility, called News Lab, is designed to help journalists do the kind of research (using Google tools of course) that underpin any good story.
Not to be outdone, a new German led project called News-Stream 3.0 is aiming to provide a similar resource hub for journalists online.
The site is a joint effort by Neofonie GmbH, the German Press Agency and Deutsche Welle and aims to provide journalists with a unique and novel analysis tool.
“Our aim is to create a research platform capable of processing heterogeneous, multimedia data streams rapidly and efficiently, performing a semantic analysis, pooling the results, and presenting a condensed overview in a uniform format,” the team say.
The new tool offers journalists the chance to scan a whole range of information from various sources, including audio, video and text messages.
“It is an amalgam of existing approaches and product-ready solutions, blended together to create new tools,” they say.
Interestingly, the results of each journalists research are stored in what are known as ‘news cases’, which are then accessible by other journalists to ensure that they are continuously up to date with the latest information.
A particularly useful feature of the site is its audio analysis capability. They’re using audio mining techniques developed by Fraunhofer IAIS to enable spoken word to be analyzed in the same way as text is normally.
What’s more, it also allows one to identify who is speaking. The feature is based on the i-vector paradigm that assigns an acoustic signature to each sound bite.
It’s all designed to ensure that journalists don’t miss a single statement from important individuals. For instance, monitors can be setup so that any speech by a prominent politician is tagged and added to the news feed of the user.
The platform has already been put through its paces by employees at Deutsche Welle, with the early feedback going into further improvements of the platform.
“This user feedback is a crucial element of the project because it enables us to make further improvements to the platform while it is still at the development stage and thus ensure it meets the requirements of future users,” the developers say.
