Journalistic Computing Links

Using Python to see how the Times writes about men and women

Via colleague Derek Willis:

Ooof: Using Python to see how the Times writes about men and women: nbviewer.ipython.org/5105037 instructive on several levels.

— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) May 10, 2013

Neal Caren:

The data comes from last week’s (February 27, 2013-March 6, 2013) New York Times. I downloaded all the articles available through LexisNexis excluding only the corrections and paid obituaries. This totals 1,379 articles, or about 200 per day. Using a modified version of an old Python script, I removed all the metadata. put the text of each article in its own file, and placed all of the text files in a folder called articles. It is not the most efficient way to go about it, but sometimes the text data comes that way so I thought I would be useful to set it up that way for didactic purposes.

…[cool code and graphs]….

Google’s Plan To Fight Human Trafficking With Big Data

A collection of tech and data companies are working together to track, map, and fight the criminal underworld that ships people around the world.

Google announced this week that it’s giving a $3 million Global Impact Award (part of a series of grants given to nonprofits changing the world with technology) to help three anti-trafficking organizations—Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International—create a Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network. While these organizations operate effective trafficking hotlines across the world, they don’t share their information. That’s the kind of big-data problem that Google can help with.

Nine months ago, Google Ideas convened a summit on exposing, mapping, and disrupting illicit networks—the kind that organize human trafficking. This is a big problem that’s often hidden from public discourse; last year, over 20 million people were trafficked across the globe, generating over $32 billion in profits.