As anyone who follows political races knows, different sources can report the same event in very different ways. We took nearly six thousand recent articles over the past month about Clinton and Obama and sent them to Mechanical Turk to be classified as favorable or unfavorable for the respective candidates. We scraped the articles from Google News restricted to several sources, and threw in front page headlines from Digg.

Here is the graph for favorability scores, aggregated by source. We found that Digg was far and away the most favorable for Obama.

The next graph tracks overall news favorability by date. To provide some context, we compared it with the change in Obama stock on the Intrade prediction market.

More details after the jump:

(more…)

Human annotators are great at providing basic information about images. We were wondering if we could find something interesting about magazine covers. Stumbling upon 2800 Sports Illustrated cover images going back to 1954, we sent them to Mechanical Turk, asking people to identify the race and gender of the person featured (if any), and what sport was depicted. There are lots of interesting things in this data; this post will touch on just a few we’ve had time to whip together some graphs for.

Here is a historical graph of the frequency of how often people of different races appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The story is simple and striking:

Next: which sports get featured on the cover? Here’s a chart for several sports over that same time.

It might be possible to find links between the careers of famous athletes and rises and falls their sports’ popularity; for example, boxing peaks in the 70’s (Muhammad Ali?), basketball peaks in the 90’s (Michael Jordan?) and golf bounces back in the 90’s after a long decline (Tiger Woods?).

Many other sports appear in the data, too; for this chart, we made sure to pick the three most common, and a few other particularly interesting ones. Percentages don’t add up to 100% because we didn’t plot all the other sports, including things like horse racing which used to be much more popular. If you’re really curious, here’s the full chart of all sports we asked about, including many of the smaller ones.

-Brendan