Source Notes: A collaboration between C.D.S., Faculty, campus I.T., and the Humanities Center

Abstract

Finding, retrieving and annotating digital news items is almost as important as their generation and storage. Our university is developing new tools for digital news research. To aid in the collection and close reading of news documents, partners from diverse units across campus have collaborated to develop a software tool that allows researchers to code and search for a vast array of subjects, names, dates, direct quotes and interpretative notes within large digital news collections.

Each news item can be annotated by multiple people with accurate tracing of each person’s contribution. Designed to be simple for undergraduates to use, but powerful enough for professional research, the text, annotations and other metadata are fully searchable. The results of researchers’ queries can then be processed by further analytical tools including text mining or individual reading. This tool’s theory, background, design and operation is described along with plans for the future.