Which cars crash most? Which automobile companies had to recall their cars over the last ten years and how does current news relate to news in the financial automobile industry domain from the last ten years?
Hacking at RICS in London
On Friday 30 2015 three teams tried to answer these questions during the NewsReader Hack Day in London. At the foot of the Big Ben (to be precise, at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors), participants explored NewsReader’s analyses of 1.3 million articles about the automobile industry from the last decade. Despite the complexity of the data, the crash investigation team managed to analyse which cars may be the most dangerous around,* the recall team revealed how we can make our data even more useful and, finally, the NewsReader word cloud team built a neat little visualisation that allows users to select input from current news and produces a word cloud from the most related terms in the NewsReader data.
Crash team’s winning car
Overall, a nice variety of applications for the NewsReader data and new insights for the NewsReader team on how our data may be used and improved. The outcome of both hackathons are nicely illustrated by Pim Stouten, Strategy Director for LexisNexis,’s words: “I’m positively excited to see two years of research and development coming to life, with NewsReader being used for real cases, and with real data.”
*we will keep the outcome to ourselves to avoid frightening you/lawsuits