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Researchers say they can use news stories to help predict the future. Scientists from the University of Illinois in the USA input over 100 million news articles into a supercomputer for analysis. The stories went back as far as 1945 and came from many sources, including the BBC and New York Times. The data showed how much unrest and discontent there was in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya before their recent revolutions. The computer also saw early indications of the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden before he was captured. Researcher Kalev Leetar said the study could now help analysts spot future trouble in potential hotspots around the world. Business strategists already do a similar thing to advise their clients.
Leetar explained the importance of news to look into the future: “News gives you incredible information about people, places, and organizations. It also tells you about the relationships between them, about how people view each other,” he said. Leetaru used terabytes of data to look at three key areas. One looked at the tone of the journalists’ writing. It used 1,500 different emotions to build an assessment of a country’s stability. Secondly, it examined geocoding to track references to people’s movement. A third technique was network analysis to show how much news channels focused on one place. Leetaru likened his predictions to weather forecasting, saying: It's never perfect, but we do better than random guessing."
