{"id":592,"date":"2007-09-10T00:56:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-10T06:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=592"},"modified":"2007-09-10T00:56:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-10T06:56:00","slug":"the-new-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/09\/the-new-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The new journalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span> lot of messianic stuff is written about what the future of journalism<\/span> looks like, but new site Wikileaks<\/span><\/a> has a pre-launch taster of the kind of materials and treatment that could underpin it.<\/p>\n

It has a leak of what it claims is a list<\/a> of US Military Equipment in Afghanistan<\/a>. Wikileaks applies a lot of Computer Assisted Reporting<\/span> techniques to analysing the data. Here is how they did it:<\/p>\n

\n

The analysis proceeded as follows: <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Understand the abbreviations, acronyms numbers and other nomenclature in the leak (specifically NSN<\/a>, LIN<\/a>, UIC<\/a>) using publicly available source information. The results of which have been documented in US Military Logistics<\/a> and elsewhere. <\/li>\n
  2. Discover various public NATO Stock Number<\/a> catalogues. Confirm the the validity of random samples of the leak using these databases and other deployment references. <\/li>\n
  3. By hand create tallies for a few interesting items observed by inspection. Write up an initial draft of the high-level analysis. <\/li>\n
  4. Learn Python<\/a>. Using vim<\/a> macros, perl<\/a> and a couple of Python programs, put the material into more presentable form, i.e Afghanistan OEF Property List<\/a> and Afghanistan OEF Property List.html<\/a>. <\/li>\n
  5. Write additional code to split out the NATO Supply Group<\/a> and NATO Supply Classification<\/a> from the NATO Stock Number<\/a> (NSN) <\/li>\n
  6. Obtain a list of NATO Supply Group<\/a> and NATO Supply Classification<\/a> codes from public US Military logistics sources <\/li>\n
  7. Learn Structured Query Language<\/a> and install a database program. <\/li>\n
  8. Pull the original leak, the group and classification code tables into a SQL<\/a> database, in this case, sqlite<\/a>, but any SQL database would have sufficed. <\/li>\n
  9. Experiment with SQL. Merge in NATO Supply Classifications<\/a> into the main leak for extra context and generate Afghanistan OEF Property List-extended.html<\/a>. <\/li>\n
  10. Experiment with SQL and discover how to generate several different tallies for the leaked items; by NATO Supply Group<\/a>, NATO Supply Classification<\/a> and NATO Stock Number<\/a>. Convert to HTML and place into the Appendix <\/a> . <\/li>\n
  11. Using SQL, generate a unique list of NSNs<\/a>. Write a program to concurrently query the US Logistics web-query NSN search for pricing information and extract the price for every NSN<\/a> on the list (except alphanumerical NSN’s which are not listed, probably due to being Management Control Numbers<\/a>). <\/li>\n
  12. Pull in the pricing information to the SQL database. <\/li>\n
  13. Using SQL, generate a new tally by NSN<\/a>, join this together with the pricing information for each NSN, sort by total price, convert to HTML and place it into the Appendix <\/a> . <\/li>\n
  14. Using SQL calculate the total value of all<\/b> equipment for which we have prices. <\/li>\n
  15. By inspection extract additional features of interest – Notable Units <\/a> , and items. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    If you want to help, they have a list of tasks to move things on…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A lot of messianic stuff is written about what the future of journalism looks like, but new site Wikileaks has a pre-launch taster of the kind of materials and treatment that could underpin it. It has a leak of what it claims is a list of US Military Equipment in Afghanistan. Wikileaks applies a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-journalists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}