News Untouched By Human Hands

At any rate, that's what 10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris claims to be providing.

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

The feeds currently being scanned are Reuters, BBC World, and New York Times International, so I think we can assumed there's human input in there somewhere.

Still, this is an amazing tool to look at and play with. Well executed and elegant. [Requires Flash]

Posted by Vanderleun at November 9, 2004 9:34 AM