Nick Diakopoulos

I ran across this round-up of some of the most prominent Political Fact Checking sites online including non-partisan FactCheck, Politifact, and  Washington Post Fact Checker Blog, as well as the partisan counter-parts: Newsbusters and MediaMatters. One of my criticisms of such sites is that oftentimes the fact-checking is decontextualized from the orginal document, especially for [...]

Games are a decent starting point for seeing how mechanical transparency is addressed in computer interfaces since many times simulation games are built around the concept of optimizing some state of the game (resource use, growth, or simply just score etc.) based on decisions the player makes. Here I illustrate how games are approaching some [...]

I’ve gone back to basics and have been reading through the HCI bible (Human Computer Interaction 3rd Ed. Dix et al.) to get a better understand how transparency is conceived of in interactive systems. System transparency does get a treatment as an element of formal interface modeling. There are several key points that we can [...]

The New York Times recently published an interactive application for exploring the video and transcripts from the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Actual debate content aside, the application is quite a usable foray into the realm of multimedia (video + transcript) interfaces. Seen here is a screen shot of the application from the 2nd presidential debate.
Overall [...]

Yesterday Google announced that they were applying some of their speech transcription research to political videos on YouTube. The philosophy – pushing research into the market to see its value and how it’s used- is great. The implementation however is rather shallow. While searching for keywords within video may be valuable for some users, several [...]

Reuters release an new API called Calais based on a semantic entity extraction engine they acquired from Clear Forest last year. It can extract Entities, Organizations, Companies, Events, and relationships between these things. Read Write Web posted a good summary of the API’s capabilities here.
Thinking about how to integrate the capabilities of this API into [...]

So I’m here in the (believe it or not sunny) Manchester, England attending the Hypertext and Hypermedia conference. I gave my presentation on our study of Jumpcut.com, which was well received albeit a bit rushed before lunch. I will admit that I’ve been surprised by this conference so far; it’s much smaller than I expected. [...]

There’s a lot of interest from new video startups in making video into a first class web 2.0 citizen by bringing tagging, commenting, and responses to videos at a sub-video level of granularity. While the old skool video sites like YouTube, Revver, Metacafe, Magnify etc. let you add tags and comments to a video, the [...]