INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

As we learn about the traditional categorization systems of IO (Svenonious, Lakoff, etc) and contrast them with the tools of next generation systems like XML and tagging, my thoughts continue to hover about a personal interest of mine which is the “ethics” of journalism and (failed?) attempts at both political and journalistic neutrality. In relation to IO, I am curious if established social definitions of terms, phrases, and colloquialisms (ex. lip product on a farm animal) can be used to deconstruct what is “meant” by an author, news feed, source, interviewee, speaker, etc.

Might a database that tracked the core metaphors implied by words and phrases somehow serve as a dissecting blade or is it up to an active community to closely watch the feeds and tag at will? Can an algorithm parse the subscripts of language? In light of our reading on machine translation, tracking bias seems like an even more distant and difficult goal.

So, two interesting tools showed up in my feedreeder this week and I thought it would be interesting to hear any opinions you all might have.

1) SpinSpotter – a Firefox plug-in that…uses “professionals” to build a set of rules, an algorithm to parse articles against said rules, and a community feedback model to track and tag.

Here is a BusinessWeek article about it.

I’ve installed it, but found that since it is in Beta, there doesn’t seem to be much feedback in the system yet.

2) And… Cognition, a Natural language processing database by Cognition Technologies. They claim that it is the “the largest commercially available Semantic Map of the English language.” RWW Article

They state that their system “Understands the meaning within the context of the text it is processing”, which seems promising. If a series of “loaded” words appears in a phrase, is that a sufficient index to call an author biased?

Anyway, if anyone has an interest in this area of information work, I would certainly like to talk more about it.