Media Cloud is collecting and analyzing the daily flow of news stories from a wide variety of traditional and new media sources.  Our goal is to support Berkman's own research efforts exploring how the Internet is changing the news landscape and to provide an open resource for others undertaking related research.

We are building a web application that automatically crawls and processes news stories from mainstream media and blogs.  We have an ever-growing database, and we are working on new and interesting ways to extract useful data from it.

Job Task/Responsibilities:

There are several possible work areas, depending on your interests and experience.

Non-technical students can help us refine our sets of news feeds.  Our project is as broad as the Internet, and we need help sorting out our existing sources and adding new sources.  You would read stories, categorize feeds, and generally learn a great deal about the types of news available online.

One technical job could involve helping us parse and process the content of the news stories.  It is a challenging task to identify the appropriate story text out of a page of HTML, and to then apply the appropriate algorithms in order to characterize the content.  This involves interesting questions related to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and statistical analysis.

Another area of work involves core work on our web application.  Like many modern web applications, we use a Model View Controller (MVC) framework.  We are currently building out our core business logic and the views for various functions.  Your experience in this are would translate into many other web application development environments.

There are other opportunities as well.  If the project in general sounds interesting to you, just drop us an email and we can discuss the possibilities.

Education/Experience Sought:

Because of the diverse opportunities, there are no overall education/experience requirements.  In general, at least some limited technical background and comfort with technologies like RSS feeds and HTML is helpful.

Desired Skills:

Technical positions require different levels of expertise.  The structure of our web application allows front-end developers and designers to work without extensive backend knowledge.  For backend developers, familiarity with the Perl scripting language, object oriented programming, and relational databases is a plus.  Experience with natural language processing, term extraction, and statistical analysis would be ideal for the text processing position.

Application Requirements:

* Letter of Interest
* CV/Resume
* Contact information – email and/or phone – for no fewer than two references (professional or academic).

Please submit all required materials to Steve Schultze at sjschultze[AT]cyber.harvard.edu.