Last week, you probably heard about Jane Mayer, the NYT journalist who was investigated by the Koch Bros for plagiarizing other reporters’ work. (Hint: she didn’t do it.)
Looks like the private eyes didn’t reveal what software they used to falsely accuse Mayer of plagiarism. But lots of free tools for text comparison mean you, too, can earn some sweet, questionable Koch money!
A new one called SameDiff was just released this year. It runs an algorithm on two text files and shows you a “cosine similarity” between two texts – a measurement of how similar they are. That may or may not be helpful to journalists.
But it also gives you a sort of Venn diagram: the most frequent words in one file, in both, and in the other file. Here are the latest stories by NPR and Reuters on the Oregon occupation:
I was hoping you could use it to compare spreadsheets, since SameDiff accepts .txt as well as .docx and .rtf files, but sadly, that is for another program to do.
I do have some other text comparison tools bookmarked:
Clearly nobody’s winning an award for creative name (except maybe Juxta), but if you have a favorite, please do chime in. I may cover it another week. Don’t you go plagiarizin’, now!