A presentation from Marcos Vanetta, Technical Lead and web developer at 3Pillar Global, and Mariano Blejman of Spanish-language newspaper Pagina 12 that was given at the 2012 Mozilla Festival in London, England.

1. Visualizing Relationships:
Journalistic Problems in a Digital
Age

2. Summary
1. Introduction
2. The Problem we are solving
3. Involved issues
4. Problems we found
5. The Challenge
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3. WHO ARE WE?
• Mariano Blejman is a technology editor
and youth editor in Argentine newspaper
Página/12, and Hacks/Hackers Buenos
Aires co-founder. @blejmanevel
• Marcos Vanetta is a biomedical engineer.
Software developer at 3PillarGlobal and
hacker at Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires.
@malev
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4. HACKS/HACKERS BUENO AIRES
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5. THE PROBLEM
• 1976 A dictatorship started in Argentina.
• 30,000 persons were kidnapped and disappeared.
• 1985 First trials happened in Argentina. They judged the
bad guys but we have to stop.
• 2003 Justice start judging the bad guys again.
• 2012 Large amount of judicial documents.
No one can read all of them
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6. INVOLVED ISSUES
• Semantic Analytics
• Ontology
• Data Mining
• Social Network Analysis
• Visualizations
Who were dealing with documents?
DocumentCloud, Overview, Open Calais, NLTK, Gate
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7. FIRST APPROACH
Read all the documents
Software solution based on regular expressions
Ruby, Padrino and MySQL database.
def self.extract_plain_text(path)
basename = File.basename(path).split('.')[0..-2].join('.')
tmp_dir = Dir.tmpdir
Docsplit.extract_text(path, :output => tmp_dir, :ocr => false)
text = File.open(File.join(tmp_dir, "#{basename}.txt")).read
self.clean_text(text)
end
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8. THE PROBLEMS WE FOUND
• Convert text from pdf files
• Extract entities from documents
• Parse dates and addresses
• Co-reference names resolution
• How to store relations
• Documents contextual information
• Confidence on data on a crowdsourcing platform.
Visualizing Relationships over the Time
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9. WHAT DO WE HAVE
NOW?
Prototype for a single (and
local) use case: mapa76
Platform for different use
cases: analice.me
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10. THE VISUALIZATIONS THAT WE
IMAGINED
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11. © Copyright 2014. 3Pillar | All rights reserved Strictly Confidential
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12. THE VISUALIZATIONS THAT WE FOUND
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13. © Copyright 2014. 3Pillar | All rights reserved Strictly Confidential
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14. THE #MOZFEST CHALLENGE
Find a big journalistic issue that involves:
• Lot of documents with unstructured data
• Lot of data to find inside
• What relationships do you wants to find
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