On January 21st, the second NewsReader hackathon and the first part of our Y2 user evaluation took place at the Amsterdam Public Library. For the hackathon, around 30 participants from research groups, as well as companies, public institutions and even some students came to the 6th floor of the Amsterdam Public Library. The participants formed teams of varying size resulting in 8 presentations at the end of the day. The NewsReader team was super happy to see so many different ideas come out of this such as in-depth analyses of the age of CEOs when they get hired or fired from companies, integration with annotation tools to provide enrichments from the NewsReader dataset and recommender systems. These are ideas we hadn’t thought of ourselves and we think could lead to interesting applications for the project.
We know that the NewsReader dataset is quite complex, due to its size and the many different layers of information embedded into it. Fortunately, the hackathon participants were up for the challenge, dug in and got some cool visualisations and analyses out. In the course of this process, the NewsReader team got lots of feedback on how to improve the API and several bugs were reported (it’s still research). We are now working on analysing our query log (100,000 queries were fired during the day, resulting in a 371MB log) and prepping for our second hackathon of this year to take place in London this Friday.
Check out some content of participants to the hackathon:
NewsReader Hackathon – blog post by Jaap Blom (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
NewsReader Hackathon – blog post by Paul Groth (Elsevier)
