Imaginary Landscape
RSS FeedThe Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has just released its Media Cloud Dashboard for public use.
The Media Cloud, located at http://www.mediacloud.org is a media aggregation and analysis tool that provides visual snapshot of what words and topics are being written about on the Internet. It allows users to select specific datasets, such as "top 25 mainstream media" or "political blogs - right" as well as specific timeframes to see what words were most often mentioned. Clicking on the word shows each sentence it appeared in within all the individual publications in the dataset.
Even more interesting is its ability to compare datasets against each other. For example, comparing "political blogs - right" against "political blogs - left" and seeing what words each site is using and sharing is an informative exercise. Narrow that down again by selecting a single topic like "Egypt" or "Palin" and the results get even more interesting.
More information can be found in this blog post by Berkman researcher Ethan Zuckerman. The software used to create the Media Cloud is open source.
Updated 05/06/11 @ 01:20PM CDT by brian
Categories: Cool Web Stuff Politics Research Web News
