Explore Independent Media

About

This is a free software project which analyses a piece of text and offers related stories coming from non-corporate sources. It is being developed as part of the Five Filters project to promote alternative, non-corporate media. The application requires Java applet support.

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How To Use

  1. Copy and paste some text or a URL into the box above and click 'Explore'
  2. Wait for the terms to appear and then the white news nodes
  3. Click on one or more news nodes to select
  4. Click 'Make PDF' to generate a printable PDF file with your selected news stories
  5. Read your non-corporate newspaper! (example)

Two Versions

The application was developed during the Interactivos 09 workshop at Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain. It was made up of three parts: a webcam to scan printed text (corporate newspapers being the intended input), a display to show the extracted terms and related content, and a printer to print a newspaper from selected stories.

The web version is based on the same code but adapted to run on the web. For Mac compatibility, various libraries had to be downgraded (Mac users are still stuck with Java 1.5!)

Installation at Medialab-Prado

1. Place news story 2. Scan 3. Select alternatives 4. Print

Web Version

1. Enter URL or text 2. Explore and select 3. Make PDF 4. Read

Video Demo

Source Code

Source code available.
Note: the bulk of this code was written in a very short space of time with the intention of getting a working system up and running very quickly (see our working diary to see how it was developed and some of the problems encountered). Since then it has been refined a little bit, but it is still quite rough. The source code here is more for those who are curious about implementation details rather than those who want to download and run the code — that's possible too, but will probably require some work and modifying paths in the code.

Installation

As noted above, the code in its current state is probably only useful for those interested in implementation details. I hope to work on it some more and provide proper instructions on how to install and configure it for user supplied news sources. In the meantime the instruction below are only for downloading the code.

  1. Change to the directory where you want to place the application files
  2. Enter bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~fivefilters/fivefilters/explore-independent-media
  3. Look inside the src folder for the Java code and public_html for the PHP code

System Requirements and Technologies

For the installation we also used:

The Team

Independent Media

Contact

For questions or comments, please email fivefilters (at) fivefilters.org