Last week, I attended the Transparent Text symposium at IBM’s offices in Cambridge. The conference focused on text-based data storage, analysis, and visualization — awesomely nerdy stuff, in other words.
Some of the presentations would be familiar to loyal readers of this site: Amanda Michel’s distributed reporting at ProPublica, Ethan Zuckerman’s Media Cloud and “nutritional [...]

DocumentCloud, the souped-up repository of primary-source material that I’ve been raving about since it first emerged in November, has a big announcement today: They’ve signed up 20 more organizations — including The Washington Post, New Yorker, MSNBC, and ACLU — to contribute documents and test the first iteration of the consortium, which is expected to [...]

Planning his Knight News Challenge entry, Joe Boydston followed his own advice: think small. He won a modest $10,000 to develop a desktop application that will allow web-challenged journalists to drag text files into a folder and have them automatically published online. “Someone at the conference asked me if I regretted not requesting more money,” [...]

The Knight News Challenge’s biggest winner, with a two-year grant of $719,500, is DocumentCloud, the primary-source index conceived by journalists and developers at ProPublica and The New York Times. Here’s why you should care: There’s good reason to believe the project will transform how some investigative journalism is conducted — and who conducts it.
Like a [...]

Here’s some more information about the Knight News Challenge application by ProPublica and The New York Times that generated some buzz and criticism earlier this month. They’re seeking a $1 million grant to develop an online repository of primary-source documents that anyone could contribute to or take from. I spoke at length with developers at [...]

[Saturday was the deadline for submissions for this year's Knight News Challenge. In the coming days and weeks, we'll be looking at some of the most interesting applicants. If you know of one you think worth highlighting, let us know, via email or in the comments. —Ed.]
Two of the biggest names in journalism have applied [...]