Instructions for Dr. Cline

Hey Andy,
I started to respond to your e-mail, and then I decided to continue this conversation on the ECP site.

Now that I have Drupal up, we can start communicating more on the site. I wrote a blog entry called "Expanding from Windows into Cafes and Bridges" where I said:

Up until now, EchoChamberProject.com has served as a window for the production of this film for transparency's stake. It can now take it to the next level by treating it more like a cafe where conversations can happen within the internal blogs. It can also now serve more as a community of practice where this virtual space can be used more for collaboration.

I also posted a reflective post about how your type of long-form analyses will scale.

Cline's long-form analysis are well-suited for his Rhetorica blog, and it will definitely be helpful to me in finding the emergent themes within the 40+ hours of interview footage.

In the larger context of this collaborative, open source project, long-form analyses would only be scalable to a couple of dozen participants. If 30 or 100 or 1000 people wanted to start doing similar analyses, then it'd start to be just as much work to condense the analyses into actionable information than it would to condense the actual interviews into a coherent film.

I go on to talk about the intermediate step that needs to be taken in order to make the long-form analysis more useful. The software infrastructure to facilitate this intermediate step hasn't been built yet, but you can do it by hand and enter the data later when the Drupal modules have been developed.

The intermediate step is to tag metadata to the soundbites. The themes should emerge from an inductive analysis of your tags, and the long-form analysis could provide a roadmap to your set of tags.

The "Scaling Collaborative Journalism" & "Swarm Intelligence Journalism" posts talk more about how this type of tag collection would be more scalable and how it will help create "tag signatures" that can quantify the subjective judgments within the Wisdom of the Crowd and provide very useful maps of the soundbite's context.

I'd be curious to hear more feedback from you about this concept laid out in these posts after you post your analysis of the Rosen interview.

And until the software infrastructure is more developed to facilitate this type of tag collection, then continue to do these types of long-form analyses. I'd suggest doing the Greg Mitchell interview next since he had a lot of interesting things to say, and he's well respected within the larger journalism community.

But as you start doing the next analysis, think about which tags you would assign to the soundbites. Maybe you could even print out the interview and write some one-word tags next to the soundbite.

These tags will be the most useful to me as well to others, and your analysis essay should be a roadmap to your tags. Looking at your previous analysis, it looks like that you've already been doing this implicitly.

A couple of other things:

To Bold in Drupal Posts -- use <strong> & </strong> instead of <b> & </b>
To Italicize -- use <em> & </em> instead of <i> & </i>

Also, why don't you go ahead and post your Plante analysis under your name and backdate it to 2005-02-22 01:40

Looking forward to the conversation.
-Kent.