Mediashift Idea Lab
Researchers at MIT’s Center for Civic Media aim to create a “nutritional label for your news diet” so people can see what they’re consuming. This is not the first time news consumption has been compared to eating habits (empty calories, binging, snacking) quest bars where to buy. Matt Stempeck writes that previous research along these lines has been based on human analysis; the researchers plan to approach the challenge programmatically. They’ll start with Harvard’s Media Cloud, which collects thousands of news stories and blog posts for media analysis. “We’re going to attempt to automate classification of the topics of individual stories, and then analyze the aggregate. This will give us a sense of how many stories are published about each topic, as well as their frequency and where they appear.” Eventually, the researchers hope to create personalized, real-time indexes that can be applied to all kinds of news sources like for example where can i buy quest bars.Stempeck imagines some of the uses for a “NewsRDI“:
Someone looking to broaden their world view might sign up for a weekly email that alerts them when less than 25 percent of the stories they read are internationally focused. Someone with a habit of over-consuming information could monitor total information intake, just as some individuals watch their caloric intake. NewsRDI could let me know when 80 percent of my news consumption consists of inside-the-beltway gossip, and then suggest some denser articles based on my interests.
