SignalScience

NewsBursts & The Long Tail of Analysis

The New Religion | courtesy of S.M.H. & M.-A.G. (c) 2013

INTRODUCTION

I am and have always been an avid newsreader.  I like to be informed about what is going on in the world. It's become a full-time job. I invest a great deal of time in the process of reading news, but also in developing efficient methods of capture and of analysis. More recently, I had the opportunity to be formally trained in the methodologies of qualitative content analysis. This, coupled with my existing practising of reading no less than 400 news articles per day, has proven to be profoundly rewarding.

Reading the news, however, even if one is performing some sort of formal analysis on news items, is not something one will necessarily get rich doing. In any case, I had to abandon the idea of ever getting rich by doing what I do. I was, after all, trained as an artist at a young age (started roughly when I was 5 or 6). I certainly would not have practised professional painting, sound design, and writing for the past 20+ years and not be aware that I was not likely to get filthy rich doing it. Otherwise, I'd either already be rich. I can assure you that I am not.

With that being said, news analysis is very hard work. One constantly encounters one's own shortcomings. One cannot read all the news, and no one is a perfect reader, meaning that there are always glitches in one's interpretation process. This is true of all literacy and literary endeavors, of all linguistic communication, signaling or messaging, or in any of the fabulous Language Arts history was kind enough to leave us as our inheritance.

However, I am not too pessimistic about it. Humans have the uncanny ability to guess sense & meaning. We call it hermeneutic guessing or hermeneutic triangulation. It is that very uncanny ability we humans have of getting at the implied meaning, the truth, or what have you. We can find meaning in anything, and news articles are always well-written, so one already has the advantage of dealing with a well-defined, well-structured, and more or less coherent text. This already makes the reader's job a lot easier.

NEWSBURSTS

What I call NewsBursts is the process of news-reading itself, except that in my case the process has been designed to have a bursty quality to it, in the first run. In the first run, I try to cover as much ground as possible, given my means. My means are increasing every day as I develop new, more efficient, methods of news-reading. At the best of times, I can currently cover up to 5000 news articles per diem, in the NewsBursts and collection/sorting phase, that is. I read as many as I physically can, but certainly not all of them. Scaling up the news-reading process is not achieved by scanning alone. One can scan headlines, and make progress, but one can never get away with not actually reading the news. It is the one thing that is unforgivable, if one calls oneself a newsreader. Otherwise, you aren't reading the news, or anything else for that matter. Faced with the constant flux of new articles, though, one cannot possible read them all. One must choose wisely how to invest one's powers of reading.

How does one ramp up a news-reading practise, to cover hundreds or else thousands of articles? It helps to develop speed-reading skills. There are many methods out there to help one improve their reading speed and comprehension. Mine happened to be partly because of the natural constitution of my human faculties, partly just from years of habitually reading vast amounts of text every day. One should never rely solely on chance, and I am confident one can easily find all the resources one needs on-line to ramp up one's news-reading rate, or else forge the abilities oneself through patience, dedication, and hard-work.

There is no free lunch. Hard work will get you there. Believe in your own resourcefulness to solve problems and increase your churn-rate.

* * *

English: Statistical meaning of The Long Tail (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE LONG TAIL OF ANALYSIS

When dealing with content of any kind, text in the example of reading the news, proper analysis takes time. It takes time, for whenever one attempts to take any sort of shortcut, one pays the price of sloppiness or something worse. Worse than sloppy? Systemic bias. The news is already a mediation of events. Someone, a human and not an algorithm, we would hope, is giving their interpretations of events of the day. The nature of writing is to be the friend of ambiguity, but humans are the foes of senselessness and incoherence. We like to read stories, and we like stories to be inherently, comprehensively, brief and to the point (when necessary or possible), but we also need them to be good stories.

What makes for a good story? Simply put, it has to resemble a story. That means it must have a good narrative form that entrains the reader, a readable style that captures the imagination and helps with the interpretation of meaning. In the case of news, it is common for news to be bite-sized. Otherwise, one could hardly be expected to read more than one newspaper per day, if it was a thousand pages of dense, abstruse, unreadable text.

Content analysis happens in The Long Tail. In the first moment of my NewsBurst process, I cover as much ground as I can. I do not spend too much time reading here. I merely scan page upon page of headlines in a newsreader app, and collect the articles in some form of bin somewhere. I cannot at this point reveal the secrets of my success, for I am working on publishing design patterns for newsreader applications. After that, I go through my collections and sort them out. I have items I leave in the collection untouched. It was enough to read the headline and get a general sense of the text by quickly scanning over it. Other items, I feel I must read more carefully. Items are tagged and classified. This is what is meant by The Long Tail of Analysis.

What happens is a slow process of going back and forth, from rapid news-reading NewsBurst activities to a much longer, more careful and meticulous analytical process, with lots of reading and re-reading of course. There is need of a proper methodology. One must learn to properly build collections, to sort through them, tagging items and putting them into proper categories. Often Taxonomies are needed. One needs to be able to find something one has already looked over. Building perspective demands it.  when I want to scale up several thousand articles per day, I am not yet capable to do all the reading, sorting, tagging, and classifying that I would like to do. As one scales up the number of articles covered in one day-tight container, one accepts certain trade-offs.

Some news need not be fully analyzed ever, or on that particular day. There is an element of timeliness both in the production of the news, the reading of the news, and in its analysis. That is, it takes time to do any of these, and there also exists another temporal quality of these things that is: the right time Oftentimes, it matters when something is released, when something is captured or collected. Sometimes exact sequences matter, or linearity. The NewsBurst/Long-Tail-Analysis process, however, is designed to work for all times. It is designed to be platform-agnostic, meaning that it works regardless of technologies used, or even yet existent.

RATIONALE

The reason I have invested so much time and energy in trying to ramp up the news-reading process is that I realized that what I thought was pertinent news to me - at any given moment - was changing as it was scaling up. That is, the more news I covered in the day, the more what I thought was pertinent to me was changing. It is necessary for one to find ways to mitigate the always-present risk of quickly becoming blind-sighted, falling prey to what Eli Pariser has called The Filter Bubble.

Who am I?

GitHub Profile: @antiface.

Facebook Page: Beautiful Signals.

Twitter: @antisignal.

This work by Alex Gagnon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.