We had lots of excellent submissions for our Demo Day at New Work City. Thanks for all interest. We are sure to do it again, such that all worthy projects will gain an audience.
Drumroll please. The Hacks/Hackers presenting on December 1.
Kushal Dave, FourSquare engineer, who will present an advance off-the-recordish look at the new FourSquare API. (See the current API) Dan Nguyen of ProPublica, who will review the data gathering and data structuring behind Docs for Dollars.
Thanks to the 80-some of you who came to the Hacks and Hackers NYC meetup July 14. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback about the event. We’d love to hear your ideas for future talks about the intersection of journalism and technology. Leave a comment or email us at nyc[at]hackshackers[dot]com.
So on to it.
Nick Diakopoulos, a post-doc research associate at Rutgers University, talked about his work on turning data into information graphics games. One example is Salubrious Nation, which challenges players to guess the public health of a communities nationwide based on county demographics.
Another is Vox Civitas, which analyzed Twitter messages posted during President Obama’s State of the Union address. Graphing keywords on a chart showing time and message volume and adding a tweet window revealed interesting patterns. For instance, Nick and his colleagues noticed a spike about 28 minutes into the president’s speech. Turns out air force bases issued a burst of tweets as he spoke about funding for military family support. Search on the keyword “military” to see for yourself.
Daylife offered Hacks/Hackers members a challenge: crerate an application with the Daylife API that one of their publishing clients wants to buy, and you will get to keep 70% of the revenue.
In conjunction with the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT, Hacks/Hackers Boston is going to have an inaugural impromptu Meetup on Thursday, June 17 at 8 p.m. The place TBD, but probably in Cambridge near MIT. We’re looking for Boston folks to become lead organizers.
Out-of-town Hacks/Hackers, including Burt Herman and Jennifer 8. Lee will be there.
