full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Alison Killing: How data-driven journalism illuminates patterns of injustice

Unscramble the Blue Letters


It's quite rare for maps and satellite images to have these blank spots because blank areas tend to draw attention to themselves. But here we got lucky. obiuncsrg the camps had inadvertently revealed all of their locations.

(Laughter)

(auaplpse)

We worked with developer Christo Buschek, who specializes in documenting human rights iusess and building tools for open-source rercereshas to map the masked-tile locations. We had to work quickly and secretively to map the mkesad teils before anyone found out what we were doing and removed them because our iniatveotsign relied on acsces to that irnfiootman. The idea was that we could go and look at the masked-tile locations and then look at that same location in other unaltered satellite imagery and see what was there. And this is what we saw. This is a former high school that became Kashgar Vocational Skills Education and Training Center. Zooming in on the satellite imagery, we can see the barbed wire in the courtyards that creates exercise pens for the detainees adjacent to the bliugndis. In other images, we can even see people, all wiraneg red uniforms, lined up in the courtyard. These features could help us decide whether a laiocotn was a camp or not.

Open Cloze


It's quite rare for maps and satellite images to have these blank spots because blank areas tend to draw attention to themselves. But here we got lucky. _________ the camps had inadvertently revealed all of their locations.

(Laughter)

(________)

We worked with developer Christo Buschek, who specializes in documenting human rights ______ and building tools for open-source ___________ to map the masked-tile locations. We had to work quickly and secretively to map the ______ _____ before anyone found out what we were doing and removed them because our _____________ relied on ______ to that ___________. The idea was that we could go and look at the masked-tile locations and then look at that same location in other unaltered satellite imagery and see what was there. And this is what we saw. This is a former high school that became Kashgar Vocational Skills Education and Training Center. Zooming in on the satellite imagery, we can see the barbed wire in the courtyards that creates exercise pens for the detainees adjacent to the _________. In other images, we can even see people, all _______ red uniforms, lined up in the courtyard. These features could help us decide whether a ________ was a camp or not.

Solution


  1. access
  2. buildings
  3. information
  4. location
  5. wearing
  6. issues
  7. tiles
  8. masked
  9. investigation
  10. applause
  11. obscuring
  12. researchers

Original Text


It's quite rare for maps and satellite images to have these blank spots because blank areas tend to draw attention to themselves. But here we got lucky. Obscuring the camps had inadvertently revealed all of their locations.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

We worked with developer Christo Buschek, who specializes in documenting human rights issues and building tools for open-source researchers to map the masked-tile locations. We had to work quickly and secretively to map the masked tiles before anyone found out what we were doing and removed them because our investigation relied on access to that information. The idea was that we could go and look at the masked-tile locations and then look at that same location in other unaltered satellite imagery and see what was there. And this is what we saw. This is a former high school that became Kashgar Vocational Skills Education and Training Center. Zooming in on the satellite imagery, we can see the barbed wire in the courtyards that creates exercise pens for the detainees adjacent to the buildings. In other images, we can even see people, all wearing red uniforms, lined up in the courtyard. These features could help us decide whether a location was a camp or not.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
satellite imagery 7
human rights 5
social media 5
chinese government 3
media data 2
million people 2
detention camps 2
industrial estates 2
ground level 2
barbed wire 2
main road 2
rights violations 2
provide evidence 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
social media data 2
human rights violations 2

Important Words


  1. access
  2. adjacent
  3. applause
  4. areas
  5. attention
  6. barbed
  7. blank
  8. building
  9. buildings
  10. buschek
  11. camp
  12. camps
  13. center
  14. christo
  15. courtyard
  16. courtyards
  17. creates
  18. decide
  19. detainees
  20. developer
  21. documenting
  22. draw
  23. education
  24. exercise
  25. features
  26. high
  27. human
  28. idea
  29. imagery
  30. images
  31. inadvertently
  32. information
  33. investigation
  34. issues
  35. kashgar
  36. laughter
  37. lined
  38. location
  39. locations
  40. lucky
  41. map
  42. maps
  43. masked
  44. obscuring
  45. pens
  46. people
  47. quickly
  48. rare
  49. red
  50. relied
  51. removed
  52. researchers
  53. revealed
  54. rights
  55. satellite
  56. school
  57. secretively
  58. skills
  59. specializes
  60. spots
  61. tend
  62. tiles
  63. tools
  64. training
  65. unaltered
  66. uniforms
  67. vocational
  68. wearing
  69. wire
  70. work
  71. worked
  72. zooming