The Five Filters

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky described five 'filters' in their Propaganda Model to explain the output of the mass media: ownership, advertising, news sourcing, flak and anti-communism (recently anti-terrorism). The goal of this project is to explore these filters using web searches and physical newspaper clippings.

Project description

This project is still very loosely defined. I'm hoping to get in contact with interested collaborators to discuss ideas and see how we can communicate the propaganda model theory through an interactive project. (Or simply create something to avoid the filters by using alternative, non-corporate, news sources.)

One idea, for the initial phase of the project, is a system made up of a camera/webcam taking still images of a table. Newspaper clippings are placed on the table. The images are processed and the text extracted using something like GOCR/Tesseract (open-source character recognition). The text is then used to identify the source of the entry and related information using a variety of web searches/APIs (e.g. Google, LexisNexis, etc). At this point, there are many options open to us and I'd like to discuss these and hear suggestions about how we can proceed.

Another idea is to use the text to find and retrieve related stories from a set of alternative news sources.

Personal profile

My name is Keyvan and I am currently studying Interaction Design in Gothenburg, Sweden. More of what interests me on my site: http://www.keyvan.net

Collaborators

I'm interested in working with people who have some interest in the propaganda model, but even if you don't, I'd be very happy to have some assistance in various areas of the project.

If you have experience in any of the following areas, it'd be great to hear from you:

* text analytics/information extraction/natural language processing (NLP)
* Processing language
* OCR
* relevance algorithms
* data visualisation

Also, I'm probably only going to experiment with English news sources (I don't speak any Spanish) so it would be great to work with someone who reads stories from alternative news sources on the web in a different language. So, for example, if you read IndyMedia Madrid or any alt. news site in a language other than English, it'd be great to work with you.

If any of these areas interest you, or if you have ideas of your own, please do get in touch - you can post here or email me at keyvan [at] keyvan.net

Project progress now available on the wiki

Web version now at fivefilters.org

ultima edicion por keyvan (25-02-2009 23:51:23)