The Information Flow Observatory

The Information Flow Observatory’s working group is engaged in a democratization approach, aiming to create a large access to the analysis of information produced by Canadian news media. It’s main motivations are an ideal of social justice and emancipation in the public space.

3 areas of activity

Area 1:

Information retrieval and data mining

The purpose of this area of activity is to develop software and methods in order to build, archive and make accessible a collection containing all content produced by the Canadian media, news agencies, and the public relations industry as well as by regional and federal governments. Data about the information flow in social media and metadata about various organizations will also be collected.

Area 2:

Information visualization

This area of activity addresses issues pertaining to visualizing the data extracted with the help of text or data mining techniques. A collection built by using this kind of techniques poses the challenge of making the data flow intelligible, of making sense of it. This area of activity therefore serves to develop tools, interfaces and methods that allow manipulating the information flow data in a more instinctive manner.

Area 3:

Critical data analysis

The goal of this area of activity is to analyze the information’s content, its distribution and paths of circulation as well as to identify the distinctive roles of different social actors implicated in the production processes of information.

Experimentation in robot journalism

The project of an experimentation in robot journalism consists in building a bot able to publish on Twitter, Wordpress and by email different...

Studying the independence of news rooms

At 12h30 on 31 May 2012, close to 24 hours after the group Anonymous published a video showing the highlights of a party at the Desmarais’ estate...

Content detection of press releases in the media

This research aims to throw a new light on a fundamental question in democracy: what place does the public relations content, more precisely press...

The media impact of a demonstration

Using the body of information it collects and the analysis software programs it develops, the IFO is able to measure the media impact of...

The long trail of media content

An analysis of media content conducted on Monday, 27 August 2012, allowed us to quantify the online news production in Quebec. It appears that...

A luminous work for the Jacques-Cartier Bridge

This project consists in bringing the bridge to light at night, with data from the media, social networks, road conditions and the weather....

The Poolitique

The Poolitique is a production concerning the Quebec politics and conducted by Simon Labonne to obtain the Master's degree in Communication at the...

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