Ever since the Libby trial, FDL has been developing ways to manage “big data” — both documents and evolving narrative — as we cover stories over time. But this latest iteration has been a particular challenge. We started out working on a basic timeline of the Bradley Manning-WikiLeaks events, but found that there were so many conflicting versions of what happened it was difficult to wrestle them all into a single chronology.

The task was made all the more challenging by the fact that most of those conflicting stories were being told by one person, the principle source for almost all media stories regarding Bradley Manning: the recently institutionalized hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned his alleged chat logs with Manning over to authorities.

Before we thought we could do justice to the story in the form of a timeline, we had to deal with the primary source documents — the chat logs — which Lamo claims are the source of all his first-hand knowledge regarding Manning’s activities. We merged all the published portions of the chat logs into one version, and then documented everything that Lamo and others had said about the contents of the logs that were not contained in previously released versions. You can find that here: Merged Chat Logs

The next task was to compile all of the media that contained source material to date. Since Lamo is by no stretch of the imagination publicity shy, and has given interviews to anyone willing to sit still, that proved to be a somewhat ambitious undertaking. We have now published a sortable table of articles relevant to the Manning-WikiLeaks story, which we will continue to add material to. You can find that table here:

Key WikiLeaks-Manning Articles

The table is sortable by all fields, including date, author, outlet and title. The “content” field in the table is devoted to excerpts that contain original relevant material. After reading through, many will understand why the whole thing may be more appropriately titled “the many mood swings of Adrian Lamo.”

If anyone is interested in contributing to the data base, there are a number of interviews that are in need of transcription. The goal will be to post complete video/audio and transcript for each on a single page like this:

Adrian Lamo on CNN With Drew Griffin, 7-30-2010 (VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT)

Credit for the work done by transcribers will be gratefully acknowledged in the posts. These are the interviews that need transcribing:

Adrian Lamo at Next Hope panel:

John Draper interviews Lamo at The Next Hope:

If we’ve missed anything (and given the loquacious Lamo, I’m confident we have) drop us a note in the comments and we’ll add it.

The transcribed data will be used by Marcy Wheeler, Glenn Greenwald and others to try and piece together what actually happened — and hold journalists to a higher standard of more responsible coverage. We’ll also use it to work up a more detailed and extensive timeline of events.

Because it doesn’t appear that the New York Times and other marquee media outlets are going to stop printing Adrian Lamo’s ever-evolving gibberish like it was gospel until they are all able to see, in painful obvious detail, how his story keeps morphing over time.

Update: Many thanks to Cedar Park who already transcribed the Risky Business interview. We’re including it on the Key Articles page.

Update II: Bmull knocked out Pt. 1 of Greenwald’s intereview with Lamo.  Notes “Lamo hinted that the government took over and continued the chats with Manning.”  (second time he’s said this)