Our Paper “new\s\leak – A Tool for Visual Exploration of Large Text Document Collections in the Journalistic Domain” has been accepted for presentation at the poster session of the Visualization in Practice Workshop, which is part of the IEEE VIS 2016 conference. The workshop will take place in Baltimore Maryland, USA on October 24-25. VIS is one of the most important conferences in visualization science. new/s/leak fits perfectly in this year’s VIP workshop, the focus of which is design, development, distribution, and application of open source visualization and visual analytics software.

Last week, we presented new/s/leak for the first time in public: we had our demo session at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which was held in Berlin this year. If you haven’t had the chance to attend (or you had and want to have some references now): Here’s the paper documenting our software (you’ll find a large part of the information from the paper in this blog, too) Here’s our poster (in PDF format) And, of course, we took some pictures, testifying how much fun we had (click for larger versions):

We already explained the language-related data wrangling happening under new/s/leak’s hood. For the success of new/s/leak, our second scientific field is the game changer: interactive visualization. No matter how much accurate information we can produce - if we cannot present them to the user in an appealing way, the tool will fail its goals. So how exactly is visualization science influencing new/s/leak? Your daily dose of visualization science It might seem easy to create some kind of visualization (with Excel or even pen and paper) - however, there are lots of pitfalls that you need to avoid to create good visualizations.

Franziska, who designed and documented our requirements analysis for her research seminar paper (Studienarbeit), turned this into an article accepted for SKILL 2016, titled “new/s/leak - Anforderungsanalyse einer interaktiven Visualisierung für Data-Driven Journalism” (in German - English translation: “new/s/leak - Requirements analysis of an interactive visualization for data driven journalism”). Congrats Franziska, and of course thanks for the excellent analysis!

Our paper “new/s/leak – Information Extraction and Visualization for an Investigative Data Journalists” was accepted for the Systems Demonstration Track at ACL 2016! ACL is the most important conference for computational linguistics, and we will present new/s/leak there. Stay tuned for the final paper version - and our publicly available prototype. Looking forward to meeting you in Berlin!

There are many reasons why data journalism needs new scientific approaches, and we have discussed some of them at length. So far we haven’t talked much about the reverse claim, which is, however, equally true: this journalistic project also advances science. So why are our scientists so passionate about the new/s/leak project? And what kind of scientific challenges do we face? /S/cience on a Mission All our scientists agree that it’s an invaluable experience to work on real use cases, solving real-world problems and collecting extensive feedback from real users.

Because of the Easter holiday season and several conference deadlines, this blog had to take a little break. Being back, we want to give a glimpse on the science behind of new/s/leak. We have two camps of scientists working together: computational linguists contribute software that extract semantic knowledge from texts, and visualization experts who bring the results to smart interactive interfaces that are easy to use for journalists (after the computational linguists made the dataset even more complicated than before).

User requirements management is something that happens far too rarely, especially in scientific software. (And it can definitely be challenging.) For our project that brings together so different worlds of science and journalism, and also different academic disciplines, it’s even more important. We dedicated this a whole day on which we had Franziska and Kathrin over at SPIEGEL in Hamburg - and we proved that requirements analysis can be both, challenging and fun at the same time.

On January 1st, we officially started to build our “Network of Searchable Leaks” or, in short: new/s/leak. Our goal is to put the lastest reseearch of language technolgy and data visualization together to help journalists keeping their heads over water when meeting a dataset like the famous Cablegate. The idea is to have a network of all actors (people, organizations, places) and show who will do what, with whom, where, and when.

Happy news: VW foundation officially decided to fund our project with the working title DIVID-DJ: Data Extraction and Interactive Visualization of Unexplored Textual Datasets for Investigative Data-Driven Journalism. We are one out of eight projects funded as a part of the initiative “Science and Data Journalism”. Our goal is to create a piece of software that visualizes the content of large text data collections, to help journalists working with data leaks.