OpenNews/hackdays/storyandalgorithm/newsyourownadventure
- Project name: News Your Own Adventure
- One-line description of project: Choose your own adventure for the news
- Your team:
- Chris Droukas () - Dan Schultz (http://www.slifty.com || @slifty) - Erhardt Graeff () - Laurian Gridinoc ()
- Project URL(s), if applicable:
http://www.newsquest.me https://github.com/openNews/NewsYourOwnAdventure/
- Hashtag, if #relevant:
- newsquest
- What are you building:
News Your Own Adventure mashes up news articles about the same topic to make it possible for readers to decide what story angles to dive into more deeply. After reading each paragraph the reader is asked to decide what the next part of the story should be. Should Barack say something funny? Do they want to hear more about the war? As content is pulled left and right from different sources it becomes possible to understand the larger narrative while also learning more about the topic at hand.
- Who is it for:
Anyone who likes interactive storytelling.
- Your goal for this weekend:
To create a prototype / demo of the system that works for at least one topic. Ideally we'll have something that works from any starting article.
- Your starting point:
The interface is "from scratch" -- the backend uses several NLP tools from Standford and CMU. Frontend is using jquery, but otherwise we're designing it from the ground up.
- Anything else we should know: NO!
- How is this project useful? It allows for a news reader to navigate through multiple stories paragraph by paragraph at the same time. Each paragraph is rendered individually coming from any given source, related to the topic you decided to read about. Then you get to choose next topic by binary option.
- Where is this project going and what lessons/concepts can be applied to other projects? This will live on the web as a site and feature that people can play with. Will add features to track data around how users navigate through system--see what people click on, what paragraphs, from what sources. And maybe will give some interesting data. That data could help organizations learn which topics people are more interested in, what types of voice/tone approaches readers respond well to, at what point in a story readers get lost or become most engaged. Many opportunities for much more detailed feedback from readers about what they want and will use, and all in the format of a game!
