River

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How To Use This

This is a tool for comparing media sources. It was created with visualizing news about the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022. In order to use it, you need to download archives of a Telegram news channel. My main aim has been to compare TASS (ТАСС; a Russian news agency) with Ukrinform (Укрінформ; a Ukrainian agency). With that in mind, open Telegram on your desktop, click the channel, export chat history, the time period and the format JSON (Why can't I just include them so you don't have to go to the hassle? I assume it's against copyright law to store others' data on a server they don't control. If you know otherwise, tell me!). Once you have both archives load them below, then enter your search terms in the right box, and a graph will be made. You can click on a x-coordinate to get a day: that will bring up all occurrences of the terms in the respective channels as well as the English wikipedia account of what was happening in the war. The x-axis starts counting from 24 February, which is day 1.

One thing to note is that the text doesn't allow or automatically enable one to search by lemmas--i.e. if you search for a genitive plural, it won't pick up any other-declined versions of the word. The reason for this is that the cost-benefit analysis seems to me not to favour lemmatizing--the ones I used tended to miss the most important part of speech for this project, names. So I recommend "making your own" stems (e.g. Мариупол, Маріупол), or, if you use just the nom single try to sensibly extrapolate from its occurrences to occurrences of all the forms of the word (maybe there's some work in computational linguistics or something that can guide such extrapolation).

My hope is this is roughly usable; direct comments to @mittmattmutt on Twitter or some other means of communication. Please reach out if it isn't working for you--I'll try to fix

Step 1: Enter your Telegram json files

TASS

Ukrinform

Wikipedia OTD

Russian Stories From TASS

Date Time Text

Ukrainian Stories From Ukrinform

Date Time Text