KNOW Project Description, Background, and Motivation

Sara Curran, Jessica Beyer • Jackson School

KNOW is an attempt to manifest the underlying educational goals of Jackson School classes online. We are creating a site that allows our students to fulfill the following two central goals:

• Become knowledgeable “experts” about current events, including knowing what is happening all over the world and the historical, political, and social context of those events.

• Gain the tools to enter into a broader intellectual conversation about why the world is the way it is. Specifically, gain the confidence and knowledge to ask academic research questions, manipulate data, write clearly, and identify evidence in support of causal arguments.

To this end, we have gathered a list of news sources from (nearly) every country and created an annotation assignment submission tool. The assignment tool asks students to provide bibliographic information about a news story, to summarize the news story, and to classify the story. Last year we tested the submission tool in four courses of varying sizes. No courses are using it now, but we plan to test our tools again during Summer 2012.

Our long term vision is that the KNOW site would have a lot of exciting tools that allowed students to learn about the world and become empowered as researchers. We want to create a tool that allows students to access data and create different types of visualizations from that data. For example, place social data on maps (ex: place levels of poverty on a map of the world) or create word clouds based on the terms mentioned in news stories about certain parts of the world. These visualizations might generate questions about why news stories vary across regions. In other words, students could then use this tool to learn how to generate research questions.

We are excited to have CSE students working on our project with us and hope to integrate some of your projects into the KNOW site during summer quarter!

Example Project 1

We really want students to be able to read, manipulate, and interact with all of the annotations. One of the major limitations of the news annotation tool that we created is that students can’t do anything with the annotations.

Thus, example project 1 is the development of a tool that would allow users to search the news sources in the database for other news articles that are about the same or similar issues/events. Then, the user would be able to do something meaningful with the information. For example:

• Find other articles about similar topics: “If you like this article, how about these other articles?”
• Gather all news stories about the same topic so the user could see how the same story was covered in a range of sources. Tied to that would be looking at a story over time. For example, gathering all news stories on a given day about the current conflict in Syria and also being able to gather all the news stories about the conflict in Syria for the past month.
• Search all sources and see which countries are covering a given news stories and which aren’t. For example, maybe Central America doesn’t cover X issue but it’s headline news in Europe.
• Compare how a news story in X country is covered in other countries versus its home country.

Some of these could also be combined in interesting ways.

Tied to this search functionality, we want students to have a way to interact with each other and with the returned information. For example, we want students to be able to talk to each other about the other students’ annotations.

Also, we want there to be a tool that would create a visual representation of how often, or where, or when, the key terms in question were mentioned in news sources across countries.

The tool would allow students to compare their news story and the news stories of others to the coverage across news sources and countries.

Example Project 2

Example project 2 is the development of a prototype tool that would allow users to look at the news annotations in relation to a large international dataset such as those gathered and maintained by the United Nations. The goal would be to allow users to look at the relationships between different data. For example, using a dataset about world conflicts—a tool could place all locations of conflict onto a map, the conflict intensity, and then map the number of news annotations that were about conflict. Or, using a dataset about world conflicts and another dataset about environmental factors—a tool could place conflict locations onto a map, highlight areas of the world where there are water shortages, and then map the number of news stories.

Essentially, the idea is to make a tool that would allow students to choose a set of variables and create on the spot visualizations such as maps, graphs, or heat maps. The IMF has a tool that is kind of like this.

Other Ideas

We have also brainstormed some other ideas that could be mixed and matched with the example projects or even among themselves. For some of these, we have links or tools that give a sense of what we have in mind; please ask if you want additional information.

• Create a network map to relationships, such as violence and water and geographic location (such as this map of disciplinary connections, perhaps).
• Create a 5x5 tool (like 10x10) for major stories for different geographical locations.
• Create a way for users to choose a year and see all issues within a given category for that year to generate research questions.
• Display the front page stories of every news source for a given day somehow – this happens in the news museum in DC – to see how many match and how many don’t match.