Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is beta testing an open-source, automated online media research tool called Media Cloud. According to the Center, Media Cloud software can already code full-text content from an extensive range of traditional and new media outlets, including blogs, and issue comparative reports about news subjects, terminology correlations and geographic story sourcing. Creators hope it will eventually be able to accept a variety of research questions and output results in several formats, including graphs and maps. So far, publications included in the database are mostly American but creators say Canadian news sources like CBC and the Globe and Mail will soon be added. It’s worth checking out.