About

new/s/leak (NetWork of Searchable Leaks) is a research project producing a piece of software that allows to quickly and intuitively explore large amounts of textual data. The tool will support journalists working with datasets like the Iraq War Diaries or the U.S. Embassy cables (both distributed by Wikileaks) or the hacking of Hacking Team. The goal is to provide a quick access to important entities (people, organizations, places) and their relationships, and how those things change over time.

new/s/leak is currently maintained and developed further by the Language Technology (LT) group at Hamburg University.

The beginning

In 2016, the project started as a collaboration of TU Darmstadt (Departments of language technology and information visualization) and Der Spiegel. . In 2017, the project moved to the newly established LT group at Hamburg University.

Based on the Network of the Day, our software combines the latest research in language technology and information visualization to create a powerful tool for searching and exploring.

Early project partners involved were

The Volkswagen Foundation funded the project for a period of 1.5 years until spring 2018 as a part of the initiative “Science and Data Journalism. The whole project budget goes to the University partners - DER SPIEGEL has waived any funding for this project. As the projects’ media partner, DER SPIEGEL delivers data for the project and, above all, is excited about the development of research-driven software facilitating the work of all journalists concerned with data.