Associated Press gets Knight funding to create journalistic tool

The Associated Press will be among 16 news organizations and Internet entrepreneurs sharing $4.7 million in funding to design innovative ways to find and deliver news in the digital age.

The funding came through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge. The AP's grant will fund a project to help journalists mine large documents for stories. The system, called Overview, will create an interactive, visual display that maps out frequently occurring keywords and shows the relationship between topics, people, places and dates. In a proof of concept, Overview scanned 400,000 documents from the Iraq war logs and plotted each incident as a colored dot. The dots were clustered based on shared keywords, such as "blindfolded" and "handcuffed." The resulting image quickly highlighted certain themes that guided further exploration. Knight said the project will get $475,000 over two years. The AP plans to share its tool with other news organizations, groups and individuals.