RE: Narrative Science

["Sally Morris" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

This sounds profoundly depressing to me.  What are research 
articles but narrative accounts of what research data means (in 
the context of why and how it was gathered, how the findings 
relate to what else has been discovered in the field, and the 
implications of the findings)?  Surely any computer-generated 
account of what data tells you will be meaningless without 
context?

Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: 01 February 2011 00:22
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Narrative Science

An early-stage Chicago-area company called Narrative Science 
(http://narrativescience.com) has just received substantial 
venture capital financing.  The company grows out of research 
done at Northwestern.  Here is a description of what they do:

"Narrative Science transforms data into high-quality editorial 
content. Our technology application generates news stories, 
industry reports, headlines and more - at scale and without human 
authoring or editing. Narratives can be created from almost any 
data set, be it numbers or text, structured or unstructured.

"Whether you maintain your own proprietary database, or cover 
subjects supported by broadly available data including public 
data sources, our technology cost-effectively turns facts and 
figures into compelling stories in real time."

I learned about this from a friend, who jocularly said to file 
the news under "End of Times/Skynet."  (Skynet is the nasty 
computer system in the dystopian Terminator movies.)

Like everybody else, I will be skeptical about this until I see a 
working demo--which the investors presumably have seen.  But if 
it works, it suggests interesting possibilities for the huge data 
aggregations now being put together:  human-readable (because 
rendered in narrative, the coin or our own though process) 
"alerts" built from big data.  Yet another publishing 
opportunity.  The possibilities are endless.

Joe Esposito