MediaCloud

Media Cloud is a project that tracks news content comprehensively – providing open, free, and flexible tools. This will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends. For instance, some of our driving questions are:

1. Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around?
2. What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources?
3. Where do stories begin?
4. How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications?
5. Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source?
6. How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage?
7. Can we track news cycles for specific issues?
8. Do online comments shape the news?

The main site for Media Cloud is http://www.mediacloud.org. There, you can see some simple visualizations generated out of our system, but the project is under very active development and there is much more under the hood. Applicants are encouraged to examine the source forge project page and subversion repository.