This week a few Knight Lab staffers, students, and faculty made it to the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech. It’s been a great couple of days filled with new ideas, lively Twitter debates, and plenty of new faces.
One of the highlights so far has been the demo presentation Thursday night. We thought these innovative projects and ideas deserved some attention beyond the conference so we’ve collected descriptions and screenshots of as many projects as possible below. (Also check out this Google Doc for a good list of what's been discussed and demoed throughout the conference.)
Take a look at what others are working on for new ideas and, hopefully, a bit of inspiration.
Of course the Knight Lab student fellows and Ph.D. students showed off their work, including the projects SoundCite, TweetCast Your Vote, Stakeholder Tweetback and Seven Sins.
If your project or its creators aren’t described quite as you’d like, feel free to send me a note and I’ll make the edits. Or if I’ve missed your project completely feel free to send a description, screenshot, and link and I’ll include it.
Dispatch — A mobile application that provides secure, authenticated, anonymous, instant publishing for reporters and others in conflict zones. Presented at Computation+Journalism by Kanak Biscuitwala.
EigenNews — Provides users with personalized playlists of video content that might interest them. It slices video broadcasts into individual stories and groups these stories by topic and relations. Presented at Computation+Journalism by David Chen and others.
NBA Graphs — Visualizes basketball game data by showing the second-by-second information for each player playing. Built by Brad Stenger.
GroundSource — “Turns mobile phones into conduits for real-time human experience, enabling journalists, researchers and many others to quickly ‘tune in’ and actively listen to the thoughts, feelings, and needs of people anywhere in the world,” according to the GroundSource site. Built by Andrew Haeg.
TweetGathering — “A prototype tool that provides curated and contextualized access to news stories on Twitter,” according to the published research. Built by Arkaitz Zubiaga.
Visuali — A data visualization tool that shows users how much debt students from universities around the country incur. Presented by Aman Parnami.
Contextifier — “A novel system that automatically produces custom, annotated visualizations of stock behavior given a news article about a company,” according to the published research. Presented at Computation+Journalism by Jessica Hullman.
The Political Grid Project — A Twitter-based website where people can vote on the politically influential tweets based on the two standards: How much they agree with the message of the tweet and how important is the issue, according to creator Tanyoung Kim.
Beyond Sentiment — “Sentiment analysis predicts the presence of positive or negative emotions in a text document. … Our approach goes beyond previous work in that our model contains a continuous manifold rather than a finite set of human emotions,” according to the paper’s abstract. Presented at Computation+Journalism by Seungyeon Kim.
Game-O-Matic — A game generation tool that lets anyone create a game based on news events. Users enter the “players” involved and their relationships to one another. Game-O-Matic then creates a series of game prototypes. When the user finds one that seems interesting, they can flesh it out with introductory text, custom images, and the like. Presented at Computation+Journalism by Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer.
What Happened to You — A tool that gives users a view of what’s happening in a particular neighborhood via geo-tagged tweets and public webcams. It also allows users to add events to a neighborhood via a map-based interface. Created by Samuel Zwaan.
Argon: An AR-Enabled Web Browser — “Argon is an ongoing project to implement AR exploiting the ubiquity of mobile phones and widely accepted web standards,” according to the Georgia Tech website. Presented at Computation+Journalism by Hafez Rouzati.
Tableau Public — A tool to create interactive data visualizations. Presented by Robert Kosara
Jigsaw — A tool that analyzes collections of text documents to identify people, organizations, and places. It highlights the connections between entities and provides a “visual index” of those entities to guide the person analyzing the documents to relevant reports. Presented by John Stasko.
Tangible Anchoring — “Tangible Anchoring explores potential practices for news reporting and analysis afforded by the convergence of tabletop computing, mobile user-generated content, the Web, and broadcast media channels,” according to From the project website. Presented at Computation+Journalism by Susan Robinson,Ali Mazalek, and team.
Video Notebook — An attempt to provide journalists the means to sync notes to video. The idea is to create a way for reporters to easily import various data feeds from places like Storify or Twitter and sync them to a recorded event,” according to the project website. Presented by Tyler Dukes of the Reporter's Lab.
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