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a special issue on “espionage amongst friends”, a topic that gained attention after the
revelations of the US-whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. In particular, Clara
and her internship friend Martha were supposed to analyze newspaper reports about
the behavior of US-president Barack Obama and the German Chancellor Angela
Merkel before and after the revelations. The interns should identify the politicians'
attitudes toward national security-related topics and if they possibly changed after
the publication of the secret documents by Snowden. How the politicians have com-
mented on the revelations and spying in general? Did they disagree on all points or
was there also agreement? Which statements about spying among allies were the
most controversial? The interns were also advised to work out whether Snowden's
actions influenced Merkel's positions to crucial election topics during her campaign
for the German federal election in 2013.
Clara and Martha split up their task into two parts. While Martha took over the
investigation concerning Barack Obama, Clara started to search for news articles
about Angela Merkel. She entered 'Merkel Snowden 2013' in the search field of her
search engine and immediately thousands of news articles were presented to her as a
never ending result list. “It will take days to go through all that news articles”, Clara
whined. But since Clara has always been a fighter, she sorted the news articles by date
and began with her research—news by news. Clara realized soon that sorting news
articles by date was not really helpful for detecting topics and positions. Although
she limited the date range and disabled displaying duplicates, the mass of news
articles was overwhelming and she had to face problems like off-topic news articles
concerning nonpolitical issues. During the coffee-break she met her friend Martha
and complained: “I'm feeling like Cinderella: 'The good ones go into the pot, the bad
ones go into your crop'. “I thought journalism would be fun”, she added and couldn't
hide her sense of frustration. “But it is!”, answered Martha, Haven't you tried out
our in-house news archiving system? It does all the stressful preprocessing-work for
you. Depending on your search query the system clusters news articles to topics and
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