For more than a year, the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) existed in my world as a series of documents, lines, dots and connections. When the FBI raided and the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of the Columbia, Mo., charity it was evident that the U.S. war on terror was active in mid-Missouri. It also provided an opportunity to test social network analysis as a computer-assisted reporting tool.
Social network analysis and IARA have been my obsession on-and-off since late 2003. I spent a good deal of that year reading about social network analysis and fiddling with UCINET for Windows software from Analytic Technologies. While journalists have traditionally used data to analyze specific details, or attributes about certain individuals or things,