The News Context Project

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 ↗, Scott Bradley, 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 ↗

Published in
Companion Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI Companion '15)
Publisher
ACM, 2015
Pages
5–8
DOI
10.1145/2732158.2732178
Research
Northwestern University Intelligent Information Laboratory

A news story is rarely self-contained. Understanding one usually means knowing something the article itself does not supply — what else has been written on the subject, what the people named in it have said elsewhere, how the discussion around it has developed.

The News Context Project built tools to assemble that surrounding material automatically and present it alongside the story, for journalists and ordinary readers alike. The accompanying open-source toolkit supported applications such as locating relevant discussion threads, surfacing quotations from an article as they circulated, and pulling remarks from stakeholders named in the piece.

Source for the project was released as NUinfolab/context.