The News Context Project

Context for news articles

The News Context Project
TitleThe News Context Project
WorkLanguage & AI
Drawnbradley.technology

A news story is rarely self-contained. Understanding one usually means knowing what else has been written on the subject, what the people named in it have said elsewhere, and how the discussion around it has moved since.

The News Context Project was an open-source toolkit, built at Northwestern's InfoLab in 2015, for assembling that material automatically and presenting it next to the story. It analyzed the page a reader was on, formed queries from its terms and named entities, sent them to the right sources, and ranked and presented what came back. Each application built on it was a different choice of source and of what counted as relevant.

TweetTalk found personal comments on a story on Twitter, filtering out the news organizations to favor individual reactions. Stakeholder Tweetback identified the people and organizations in a story, found their verified accounts, and showed what they had posted about it. readdit found the Reddit discussion threads about it. Each ran as a browser extension or through a web interface.

TweetTalk: four tweets reacting to the January 2015 Paris march, in a pop-up beside the article
TweetTalk on a January 2015 New York Times story about the Paris march, from the IUI paper.
readdit: the keywords drawn from a BBC story on the Paris attacks, and fourteen related Reddit threads
readdit on a BBC story about the Paris attacks: the extracted keywords and the threads found for them.

The work was published as The News Context Project at IUI 2015, with Larry BirnbaumLarry BirnbaumProfessor of computer science at Northwestern and co-director of its Intelligent Information Laboratory. Co-founded Narrative Science and was its chief scientific adviser.LinkedIn ↗, Miriam BoonMiriam BoonScience journalist turned researcher. Did doctoral work in Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern, building journalism prototypes at the InfoLab; now at the University of Regina.LinkedIn ↗, and Jennifer WilsonJennifer WilsonDeveloper at Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory and the Knight Lab, with a background in software startups; now at Test Innovators. Bachelor's in economics and MMSS from Northwestern, M.S. in computer science from DePaul.LinkedIn ↗. The source was released as NUinfolab/context, MIT licensed.

Built with

Python, with NLTK for the text analysis and Flask for the web application; the browser extensions were built with Kango.