According to the publisher, this book is the first of its kind. It is designed to be a concise handbook written specifically for beginners, and offers a practical overview of database managers, spreadsheets, and the various on-line resources available to help reporters do their work.
While it is advertised as a supplemental textbook for advanced journalism courses, this impressive little publication can be a useful and important reference for virtually any working communicator. I found Chapter 6, "On-line Resources: Everything but the Internet," to be worth the price of the book. It covers such topics as on-line newspaper clips, direct dialing into government resources, local and state records and various commercial services.
Other chapters cover the basics of "high-tech" journalism, use of statistics, search techniques for using the World Wide Web, and locating, negotiating and importing databases. There are also useful appendices covering everything from software to query language.
This is a user-friendly book. It includes step-by-step procedures for those less experienced in computer information searches, while computer-screen graphics guide the reader through the actual use of software for data analysis. It uses actual examples to illustrate many of the common advantages of using the computer to assist in the collection of information.
One such example is the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. On-line resources helped several reporters in the aftermath of that dramatic and tragic event, with much of the early information appearing in "chat" sessions on the Internet. In addition, information about militia groups and their beliefs was available through various newsgroups, and news about survivors and government action following the bombing quickly appeared on-line. Reporters also were able to use on-line listings to locate experts and library references pertinent to the story.
Other interesting examples include the use of on-line databases by reporters in Ohio and Connecticut in murder investigations. In both cases, the journalists were able to establish patterns clearly indicating the work of serial killers. (One of the reporters actually was Brant Houston, the author of Computer-Assisted Reporting.) In compiling data for such stories, the author demonstrates the importance of not only knowing how to search for information but also the very practical value of moving beyond stacks of index cards and into the electronic age in terms of keeping track.
Houston is a long-time daily newspaper journalist and managing director of the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting at the University of Missouri. He has conducted a number of seminars and workshops on the subject, through which he's helped train hundreds of professional print and broadcast journalists in computer-assisted reporting.
Houston obviously called on a number of practicing journalists as well as academics for suggestions during the preparation of this book. That shows up not only in the selection of subject matter, but also in the careful avoidance of "technospeak." An example: The modem, Houston explains, is "one of the clunkiest devices in the computer world."
The IBM disk that accompanies this book contains sets of sample data for use in various exercises that provide simulated hands-on training. A Macintosh version also is available.
Computer-Assisted Reporting is precisely what the sub-title suggests: a practial guide. It doesn't offer a great deal that will be new to the experienced on-line information searcher, but for those of us less knowledgable in the area of electronic searching it is a valuable reference to have at hand.
The Virtual Community, a book about the social aspects of computer networks, was written by a self-described "uncredentialed social scientist" and participant in the political protests and social upheavals of the late 1960's. The book's author, Howard Rheingold, a keynote speaker at last summer's international ACE conference, is a San Francisco-based freelance writer, multi-media columnist, and editor of the Whole Earch Review.
Rheingold has organized the book around reviews of various types of computer networks. The first two chapters of the book are a case study of a low-cost computer network in the San Francisco Bay area created by the founders of the Whole Earth Catalog. The third chapter is an authoritative and readable history of the Internet. Chapters four through six introduce readers to what the author calls "groupmind systems" including Usenet, Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS), and Internet Relay Chat (IRC.) Chapters seven and eight review computer networks in Japan, France and England. The ninth chapter begins with a review of successful applications of computer networking to political organizing projects in Colorado Springs, rural Montana, San Francisco and Santa Monica. The final chapter builds on the theme of the threat of network domination by private enterprises, and provides a readable critique of new technology based on the writings of Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucalt, and Jean Baudrillard.
As with all books about timely topics, the strongest parts of the book are those that will endure as the world changes. The historical reviews at the beginning and the theoretical critiques at the end of the book will continue to be useful. The rest of the book is limited by the 1993 copyright date.
Newsweek magazine declared 1995 the "Year of the Internet" in response to significant growth in users that occurred during the year and because of the emergence of the multimedia-rich World Wide Web as the fastest growing segment of the Internet. The Virtual Community was published before the World Wide Web began its exponential growth. As a result, the book falls short of the author's stated purpose of clearly presenting information about the state of the "Net" in order to help citizens of democratic societies make wise decisions about how the Net ought to be governed.
Although Rheingold anticipated the vast increase in use of the Net, he did not anticipate some of the consequences of that increase. Universities across the country have instituted local bans on the use of IRC's and MUD's, making the book's detailed discussion of these types of systems generally moot for readers who access the Internet through university accounts.
In spite of these shortcomings, Rheingold provides potent and enduring critiques of the state of computer networking. His discussions of anti-social behavior associated with use of the Internet are particularly relevant.
Rheingold's critique of network domination by corporate giants is also relevant to recent developments in the telecommunications and computer industries. Perhaps owing to his roots in the San Francisco counterculture, the author is critical of the commercial model of computer networking. Recently merging corporations tend to view the Internet as a new way of capturing the attention of audiences rather than as a relatively unrestricted public forum to be used for political activism and community betterment.
Although The Virtual Community contains much dated material, it is clear that the author is an authoritative voice in the debate about the social impact of computer networks. Readers intrigued by Rheingold's penetrating analysis and engaging writing style may visit his homepage on the World Wide Web: http://www.well.com/usr/hlr/. Rheingold is an active Web publisher who uses his homepage to review the current state of the Net and to provide links to many of the sources mentioned in his book.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that the emergence of the World Wide Web has been the undoing of this book is the fact that the author uses his Web site to provide readers with a full-text version of The Virtual Community-free of charge.
In just four years the Web has gone from an arcane province of a few cognoscenti to the preferred method of information delivery for thousands of academic institutions, businesses and organizations. Since the beginning, Web browsers have had the capability to download audio and video files which could then be played by helper applications. But one of the hottest areas of product development for the Web today involves live and on-demand delivery of audio and video files.
In plain English, this means that sound and video clips can be heard and seen while they are being transmitted, either live or from a file, without waiting for huge files to download. One of the products that promises this miraculous performance is StreamWorks, by Xing Technology. The StreamWorks network architecture allows delivery of content to multiple simultaneous users over local as well as wide area networks, using international standards-based components. It employs Unix and Windows NT servers, TCP-IP connections, MPEG video and audio compression, and HTTP-HTML client server communication.
The Xing Technology Corporation server offers live radio station feeds as well as pre-recorded music selections at 8.5, 24, 56 and 112 kbs (kilobits per second). The lower rates are for users with 9600, 14.4 or 28.8 baud modems, and the 56 and 112 kbs rates are for ISDN or T-1 lines. There are also sample video clips for ISDN, and NBC video clips at all rates. Other publicly accessible StreamWorks servers include the University of Nebraska, UNC Chapel Hill, and several servers in Finland.
To evaluate network software properly, one must consider 1) platform capability; 2) type of connection; and 3) a comparison with similar products, if possible. The platform used in reviewing StreamWorks is an IBM-compatible 486-66 MHZ with 16 MB of RAM, 540 MHZ hard drive, and a Proaudio 16 sound card. The network connection is a university-based T-1 line. Direct comparisons will be made to RealAudio, and a third, unevaluated realtime video/audio product is Vosaic by the makers of the Mosaic web browser. So with all the preliminaries aside, we come to the essential question: how does it look and sound?
At the higher transmission rates, the stereo sound is impressive - equal to CD quality. The lower rates are on the level of AM radio quality. The only drawback is that at times of high usage on your Internet connection, some information is lost. StreamWorks seems to handle this by maintaining sound quality but allowing dropouts in the sound. It is possible that a Pentium machine or its equivalent in other platforms would perform better in this respect than the 486 used in this review. By comparison, RealAudio tends to diminish sound quality but maintains the integrity of the sound stream. For video, playback is at compressed video rates of 30 frames per second at best, and usually slower than that. Again, loss of information causes dropouts or pauses in the delivery of the video signal. A faster platform might improve this performance as well, but on the terms of this review the audio capabilities of StreamWorks are more pleasing and immediately useful than the video. Still, with the dizzying pace of technological progress in the past few years, StreamWorks and its competitors can be expected to address these problems and offer high quality realtime audio and video over the Web in the near future.