The Chicago Justice Project’s Justice Media Project collects and analyzes local reporting on crime, violence, and justice issues in Chicago. The goal of the project is to document where disparities exist between the reporting on these issues and how Chicago’s communities actually experiences crime and violence in Chicago.
CJP scrapes news websites and collects media coverage from across the media spectrum in Chicago. Using a training set of over 40,000 articles that were hand categorized by volunteers over the last 7 years we have recently trained an algorithm to categorize the articles as they are scraped. We are also in the final steps of installing the architecture to geo-tag each article as it is scraped and provide us the community area that is covered in the article.
Project 1: Data Analysis & Visualization Project Using data collected in 2017 we would like students to assist us with creating innovative ways to analyze and visualize this data in conjunction with Chicago Police Department crime incident data and call for police service data from the Office of Emergency Management & Communications. For violence against women crimes we will be seeking to create a separate analysis that also takes in to account aggregate data related to from where in the city survivors seek services from domestic violence and sexual assault service providers.
Project 2: Sentiment Analysis of media coverage Using data collected in 2017 we would like students to assist us is creating the infrastructure to help us determine whether media coverage of crime, violence, and justice issues in Chicago is favorable, negative, or neutral in regards to how it portrays the criminal justice agencies and their agents.