Anyone who thinks Big Data projects are easy or inexpensive, would do well to read Giannina Segnini’s piece on the painstaking efforts by staffers at La Nación Costa Rica to clean and meld data in numerous formats and tables, with misspellings, abbreviations, weird punctuation, etc., into something resembling usable form. Just eliminating duplication proved a huge challenge, requiring, among other things, the use of a library developed by MIT and named Vicino that performs “nearest neighbor searching and clustering” and an algorithm, called SIMIL, that looks for similar strings of data. One important consideration, for instance, was making sure that the people with similar-sounding names were in fact the same person.
—Then there’s the business model: ICIJ is an offshoot of the Center for Public Integrity, and is philanthropically funded. Recent ICIJ funders include: Open Society Foundations, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the like. The collaboration with commercial news organization makes it something of a hybrid, a model that has been put to good use elsewhere and makes all sorts of sense. Whether nonprofits can ever make up for what’s been lost in the news business is an open question. But this arrangement is on scale that’s vastly larger than those tried so far. Coordinating among so many organizations is a job unto itself. And given the expense and risk of such grand investigative projects, the more resources available the better.
For a few reasons, then, this type of project is worth watching as a kind of ad-hoc model for the Great Stories, the longform, labor-intensive projects that, once again, prove indispensable.
So, they're basically doing the bidding of the State, by "saying something" when they "see something." This is popular journalism in America: ratting out those who don't give "their fair share" to Our Omniscient Overlords.
"The government says to the citizen: 'Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.' ...
"The amount of your earnings that you may retain for yourself is determined by the needs of government, and you have nothing to say about it. ...
"In short, when this amendment became part of the Constitution, in 1913, the absolute right of property in the United States was violated.
"That, of course, is the essence of socialism. Whatever else socialism is, or is claimed to be, its first tenet is the denial of private property. All brands of socialism, and there are many, are agreed that property rights must be vested in the political establishment. None of the schemes that are identified with this ideology, such as the nationalization of industry, or socialized medicine, or the abolition of free choice, or the planned economy, can become operative if the individual’s claim to his property is recognized by the government. It is for that reason that all socialists, beginning with Karl Marx, have advocated income taxation, the heavier the better." -Frank Chodorov
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Mon 17 Jun 2013 at 06:19 PM
Well, Dan, I take it you are 16 and have just gotten your first paycheck from a summer job and discovered that you, like everyone except the ultra-wealthy and corporations with smart accountants and good lobbyists, may have to pay for the roads you drive on, the firemen who put out fires and the like. Because only an adolescent mind could write with the sense of hurt and surprise - and lack of facts - that you do. Of course, you will have a say in taxes when you are old enough to vote. There was never an absolute right to property in the US, as you will learn later in high school. Well, that is, if you go to an adequately-funded high school, and not one underfunded by adolescent ignoramuses like yourself.
#2 Posted by Bobo Brazil, CJR on Tue 18 Jun 2013 at 10:32 AM
Bobo Brazil: I'm impressed that you understood enough to reply. I don't have a clue what this blizzard of irrelevancy even means.
#3 Posted by Tom Jones, CJR on Fri 21 Jun 2013 at 03:52 PM