Re: Narrative Science

[Velterop <velterop@gmail.com>]

This seems to be just a case of misuse of the word 'science'. 
This says it all: "Our first automatically generated story 
described a Northwestern Wildcats baseball game."

Jan Velterop

On 02/02/2011 00:09, Sally Morris wrote:

> 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