The European Parliament represents the citizens of the member states of the European Union (EU). The accounts of its meetings and related documents are open data, promoting transparency and accountability, and are used as source data by researchers. However, the official portal of these documents provides limited search facilities. This paper presents LinkedEP, a Linked Open Data translation of the verbatim reports of the plenary meetings of the European Parliament. These data are integrated with a database of political affiliations of the Members of Parliament, and enriched with detected topics from the EU's topic hierarchy and links to four other Linked Open Datasets. The results of this work are available through a SPARQL endpoint and a user interface with extensive browse and search facilities. It is now possible to combine in one query the time and topic of the debate, the spoken words -in any available translation -and information about the speaker uttering these, such as affiliations to countries, parties and committees. This paper discusses the design and creation of the vocabulary, data and links, as well as known use of the data.

Photography contests have assumed an increasingly significant public role in the context of the global surge of mass-mediated war reporting. This study focuses on the recurrence of visual tropes in press photographs awarded in the annual contest World Press Photo (WPP) in the years 2009-11. By tropes, we mean conventions (e.g. a mourning woman, a civilian facing soldiers, a distressed witness to an atrocity) that remain unchanged despite their travels across the visual sphere, gaining professional and public recognition and having a strong affective impact. We contend that photography contests such as the WPP influence and organize a process of generic understanding of war, disaster and atrocity that is based on a number of persistent tropes, such as the mourner, the protester or the survivor amidst chaos and ruins. We further show that these tropes are gendered along traditional conceptions of femininity and masculinity, appealing strongly to both judges and wider audiences. The evidence for our claim comes from an analysis of the photographs that won awards, observation of the judging sessions, semi-structured interviews with three jury chairmen, and public commentary on the juries' choices (blogs, newspapers and websites). Keywords icons, observation, photography, tropes, visual content analysis, World Press PhotoPhotography contests have assumed an increasingly significant public role in the context of the global surge of war reporting. Spectacles on a par with contemporary art fairs,

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With an ever-growing supply of online sources, information to produce news stories seems to be one mouse click away. But in what way do Dutch journalists actually use computer-aided research tools? This article provides an inventory of the ways journalists use digital (re)sources and explores the differences between experts and novices. We applied a combined methodological approach by conducting an ethnographic study as well as a survey. Results show that Dutch journalists use relatively few digital tools to find online information. However, journalists who can be considered experts in the field of information retrieval use a wider range of search engines and techniques, arrive quicker at the angle to their story, and are better at finding