By Rochelle Sharpe, Adrienne Debigare, and David Larochelle

With the investigation into the Boston marathon bombings now an international inquiry, we want to explore how different countries are covering this continuing story.
We want to compare how the U.S. and Russian media are covering the investigation, examining newspaper and blog posts on the FBI’s handling of Russian intelligence about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. We will use Media Cloud as a base to explore coverage, perhaps designing user friendly graphics to make Media Cloud information more user friendly.

Alternatively, we may look at ways to use machine learning to help analyze bombing coverage. For instance, we might be able to use machine learning to group articles by topics or look at patterns of tweets.

One major problem is that Media Cloud’s Russian coverage is in Russian. So, we have found a student to help us do some translation.