Harvard Unveils Web Tool for Studying Media Trends

Harvard Unveils Web Tool for Studying Media Trends: The Chronicle of Higher Education

"There’s a lot of debate over the state of the news media these days, but a team of researchers at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is trying to make discussions of content and bias a bit more precise."

"This morning, the Berkman Center unveiled Media Cloud, a research tool that designers say will help researchers study news-media trends with a level of quantitative precision previously unavailable. Powered by software that automatically identifies various elements — such as people, places, and topics — contained within an article, Media Cloud allows users to query a database of online content from more than 1,500 blogs and traditional publications."

Capture, store, and share information - Sounds old rhyme, right?

But now this story is getting newer interface (call it interface 2.0). Thanks to Martha for sharing the info about the Living Library!!! I Googled to see true colors of the LL, and found the following:

Living library idea as a knowledge managment tool
by Shaunna Mireau on October 30th, 2008
A recent article in Library Journal caught my eye: “Living Library” Debuts in Santa Monica1 As the article explains the living library movement invites library users to ‘book’ meetings with individuals with special interests, beliefs or experiences.

Extract: Wouldn’t it be interesting to add information to the library catalog with the following model:

Title: Vicarious liability
Author: Partner X
Physical Description: 6′1″, folio [individual will come to your office or lunch for a discussion of the title topic].

Seriously though, there are many ways to formalize tacit knowledge transfer that already happens in informal ways. It is neat that this kind of tacit transfer is being encouraged by public libraries. If a public library can work with this model, our expertise filled organizations can too.continue reading

See also on the same shelf:

• LIVING LIBRARIES, Experience that speaks volumes, Toronto Star Feb 26, 2009
  
• Doing the Library Thing by Wendy Reynolds March 1, 2009
• Living Libraries in Canada in March
  March 5-6th, University of Guelph, Ontario
  March 5th, Coquitlam Public Library, British Columbia
  March 21st, Calgary Public Library, Ontario
  March 23-27th, University of Alberta, Augustana, Alberta