Post en español

Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires is announcing a hackathon (a day of programming between journalists and software developers) in order to work on Mapa76.Info, an Internet software for the automatic extraction and visualization of data from text documents. The hackathon will take place on Saturday, August 13, in the pressroom of the mega-exhibition Tecnopolis Argentina (photo) and will focus on the trials of the last military dictatorship, which are currently in progress. (How to get to Technopolis in Google Maps)

So far, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires has held three meetings, two in Buenos Aires (120 to 150 attendees) and a hackathon in the city of Rosario, where we worked on an interactive application in HTML5 for audiovisual media coverage as part of the 4th Digital Journalism Forum of Rosario. Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires will participate in the Mozilla meeting in November in London and will announce more hackathons soon.

From this group emerged a software project, called Mapa76.info, for extracting data from the trials of the military dictatorship. The goal is to create an automatic visualization of life histories from the period 1976-1983, based on court evidence, arguments, and sentences. The software is intended to create a platform to serve as a tool for investigative journalism, history, and law.

What will we do?

10:30 a.m. Present the project and show the possibilities of the software.

12:00 p.m. The hackathon begins: advancing the development of the code and the accumulation of content.

For Journalists:

Bring documents of testimony, lawsuits, sentences, newspaper articles, etc., in text document format (.Doc, .Odt, rtf, etc.), and think of how it would be desirable to view them.

For developers:

• Improve the interface for loading documents and data extraction (Ruby/jQuery)

• Improve the query interface for data (timelines, maps, document viewing) (Ruby/jQuery).  The project is developed in Ruby, Sinatra, MySQL, jQuery. The code will be released at mapa76.info.

7 pm – 9 pm Presentation of results to the general public

PS: To enter the hackathon in Technopolis you must have enrolled at http://meetupba.hackshackers.com and confirmed your participation in the event.

The organizers of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires are Mariano Blejman (Página 12), Martin Sarsale (Sumavisos), Guillermo Movia (Mozilla Argentina), Cesar Miquel (EasyTech) and Mariana Berruezo. Thanks to Michael Romano for “native” english edition of this post.

Web http://meetupba.hackshackers.com

blog http://www.hackshackers.com

mail ba@hackshackers.com

twitter @HacksHackersBA