John Carney, senior editor at CNBC.com, had an idea for sifting through the data — crowdsource it.

We agree. In fact, CrowdFlower will categorize and tag the first 100,000 documents at no cost to the government.

If you’re just tuning in, the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) subpoenaed Goldman for its AIG transactions, following accusations that Goldman cooked up a mortgage investment scheme that was rigged to fail.

FCIC has around 50 employees, an $8 million budget, and roughly six months to pore over the five terabytes of data. (Can you say, “Too small to succeed”?)

Clearly, technology presents a double-edged sword for investigators and other regulators.

On the one hand, companies under investigation can use technology to more efficiently bury investigators in terabytes of data (paging Goldman Sachs). On the other hand, technology provides tools for deftly sifting through the data (enter crowdsourcing).

Crowdsourcing public documents may be relatively new, but it’s not unprecedented. In fact, the British Parliament is under way with a project that uses crowdsourcing to investigate MPs’ expenses.

We’ll keep you posted on whether the government takes up our offer.

– Additional contributions by Anisha Sekar.

Here is the graph for favorability scores, aggregated by source. We found that Digg was far and away the most favorable for Obama.

The next graph tracks overall news favorability by date. To provide some context, we compared it with the change in Obama stock on the Intrade prediction market.

More details after the jump:

We created our data set by doing two separate searches, one for “Barack Obama” and one for “Hillary Clinton”. This did a pretty good job ensuring that results from Google News or Digg’s search facility demonstrated how the article was about the given candidate. For each article, we showed the headline, search result snippet, and link to several Turkers. They reported whether it was positive, neutral, or negative toward the candidate.

The favorability metric was created by averaging the ratings across articles. Pro-Obama and anti-Hillary articles were both worth 1 point; anti-Obama and pro-Hillary both worth -1, and neutrals 0.

Therefore, if all articles are either positive towards Obama or negative towards Hillary, the rating is +100%; and vice-versa for -100%.

The data is very noisy. The question of favorability is extremely tricky: it includes a combination of expectations, sentiment, and the objective events a newspaper chooses to report. All of these are hard to reliably assess or even define. (And whether anything you measure constitutes “media bias” is another complicated question!)

Despite all this philosophical intractability, the data must be showing something real, because we have a statistically sound result: the difference between Digg and the others was statistically significant (t-test, p<.001). The differences within the mainstream media were not statistically significant.

-Brendan, Chris, Lukas, Mike

Here is a historical graph of the frequency of how often people of different races appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The story is simple and striking:

Next: which sports get featured on the cover? Here’s a chart for several sports over that same time.

It might be possible to find links between the careers of famous athletes and rises and falls their sports’ popularity; for example, boxing peaks in the 70’s (Muhammad Ali?), basketball peaks in the 90’s (Michael Jordan?) and golf bounces back in the 90’s after a long decline (Tiger Woods?).

Many other sports appear in the data, too; for this chart, we made sure to pick the three most common, and a few other particularly interesting ones. Percentages don’t add up to 100% because we didn’t plot all the other sports, including things like horse racing which used to be much more popular. If you’re really curious, here’s the full chart of all sports we asked about, including many of the smaller ones.

-Brendan