Articles tagged: automation

1. 

   Choose Your Own Mad Libs (or, how you can plug data into automated stories and free up lots of reporting time)

   By Mike Stucka

   Posted on March 21, 2023

   From housing prices to weather to employment, templates can generate hundreds of stories at once about numbers that people care about.

2. 

   Running scrapers on GitHub to simplify your workflow

   By Iris Lee

   Posted on November 7, 2022

   How the LAT Data and Graphics team uses GitHub Actions to keep code and data in one place, and track scraper history for free.

3. 

   Databae, Better Bots, and the Automation We Need Right Now

   By Steven Rich and Aaron Williams

   Posted on September 12, 2017

   Find practical approaches to creating software to cover democracy, from a SRCCON 2017 session

4. 

   Do News Bots Dream of Electric Sheep?

   By Samantha Sunne

   Posted on April 29, 2016

   Bots have been making the news more and more lately, partly due to the underlying technology becoming more common, and partly due to bots becoming rampaging racists. PCWorld recently suggested that 2016 may be “the year of the bots.” But if you read the article, all the examples are of chatbots—bots, to be sure, but only a subset.

5. 

   When Bots Get Together: Part 2

   By Ryan Pitts

   Posted on April 28, 2016

   Here’s the second half of our report-back from Austin’s code convening, introducing five more bot-centered open source projects from our participants.

6. 

   When Bots Get Together: Part 1

   By Ryan Pitts

   Posted on April 27, 2016

   Code convenings have been regular events on the OpenNews calendar for a little more than two years now, each of them bringing a small group of designers and developers together to work on projects that fit a particular theme. Given a chance to step away from normal routines and daily deadlines, participants spend a couple days writing code and documentation before releasing fresh open-source projects and updates into the journalism community. The Austin event earlier this month definitely was our largest so far, with nine projects. It was a fantastic mix of people, with developers and designers from all sizes of news organizations, and fields like education, finance, and civic tech. Here’s what everyone is working on.

7. 

   Simbot, Give Me Five

   By Yian Shang and Elena Zheleva

   Posted on April 26, 2016

   At Vox Media, data science and data engineering are working together to build products with editors’ and journalists’ needs in mind. One such experimental product is a Slackbot that enables editors to discover relevant content on demand.

8. 

   Yo Dawg I Heard You Like Bots

   By

   Posted on April 26, 2016

   The Platte Basin Timelapse Project started in March 2011 with the goal of placing timelapse cameras throughout the basin and documenting time passing along one of Nebraska’s most important water resources. Now, they have more than 40 cameras placed, each taking photos during daylight, every day, every hour, all year long. Over the life of the project, they’ve gathered more than a million images and terabytes of data.

9. 

   What Is the Sound of PunditBot Yapping?

   By Jeremy B. Merrill

   Posted on April 26, 2016

   The best PunditBot can do is imitate cable-news pundits or sports commentators filling airtime with useless predictions, largely because it lacks a human’s domain knowledge and ethical drive to use journalism to inform democracy and craft a fairer society. My experiment with PunditBot makes me bearish on independent robotic journalists (and bearish on human TV pundits) but I’m optimistic for a future of human-robot journalism teams.

10. 

    Peda(bot)gically Speaking: Teaching Computational and Data Journalism with Bots

    By Nicholas Diakopoulos

    Posted on April 25, 2016

    Bots encapsulate how data and computing can work together, in journalism. And when we use bots to teach concepts and skills in computational journalism, we’re actually teaching two kinds of thinking: editorial and computational.

11. 

    Welcome to Botweek 2016

    By

    Posted on April 25, 2016

    Today kicks off the third annual Source Botweek, our yearly push to document the newsgathering bots, Slackbots, Twitter bots, and other automated creations that have emerged from newsrooms in the last year—and to check out a few extras from the makers of less practical/more adorable bots.

12. Welcome to Bot Week

    By Erin Kissane

    Posted on March 24, 2014

    Automated news-gathering tools aren’t new, but they’re multiplying like crazy and getting quite a bit of attention. Little bots have also turned into interesting remixing devices and distribution channels, especially on Twitter. This week on Source, we’re going 100% bot.

13. 

    Model Analysis

    By Erik Hinton

    Posted on September 17, 2013

    The New York Times’ Erik Hinton breaks down a Fashion Week colorbar special feature with bonus fancy math.