making a better archive

I do not like the way news sites archive stories on selected topics. Who can get any overview from a page like BBC's Iraq in Transition?

One of the aims of my current research project LiveArchive is to make better archives. I want an archive that offers you a coherent story of what has happened so far, not too long, and including the latest developments.

I decided today that my first experiment will be a stretchtext archive of VG Nett's coverage of the scandalous theft of Munch's Scream and Madonna the day before yesterday. My research notes will be in this blog.

VG has an archive page, and I'm copying every story from the site and adding it to Tinderbox.

Each story is marked with a time in a chronology variable. This is not the time of publication, but the time when the action reported took place. An agent sorts the stories by this chronology.

I will add other variables later to pick out the more important notes and create a stretchtext.

This morning's notes:

Many of the stories report on different points in time, for example, the robbery, the discovery of the escape car, the discovery of pieces of the frames, and some comments from the museum's director. I cut these stories up and put them in different notes with different timestamps.

Some reports are about events before the robbery: other famous art thefts, the decision not to insure the paintings. An agent will have to sort these out separately and mark them as "background" or something.

There are parallel actions here, which calls for forking chronologies. Some seminal nodes will have to be singled out, and developments from these nodes available through links. Examples: The insurance story, debate on security in Norwegian museums.

There are (of course) different kinds of stories: background, comments and reactions. These should be sorted by assigning variables, perhaps using 5w1h (What, Where, When, Who, Why, How).

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