I remember several years back hosting applications like OddCast on a Website and having computer-generated avatars greet visitors was a cool thing to do. The avatars seemed to follow mouse movements with their fake eyeballs!
Well, the human part, curation, might come to an end, sooner than we think.
Kris Hammond, one of the founders and CTO of Narrative Science, a company working on technologies to generate narratives from data, thinks in 15 years, 90 percent of the news stories will be computer generated, as he discusses here. There will still be room for human curation, but many of the stories will be almost entirely “automated”:
A computer can write highly localized crime reports, personalized stock portfolio reporting, high school and youth sports stories at scale to provide coverage that was previously impossible and could never be possible in a world of purely human generated content.
I doubt we are anywhere near generating narrative stories from unstructured data. Yet, news story automation already may be here. In early December 2011, a computer-generated news portal called The Wall launched, analyzing and displaying real-time local Twitter trends while automatically clustering the information into news topics.
On closer examination, I found each clustered news story ends up linking to one or more actual newspaper stories written by a human reporter. So, while perhaps human bias is not eliminated, the selection of stories appears to be automatic.
The Fast Company piece points out a surprising discovery made using DocuScope. Othello -- despite labeled a tragedy -- turns out to be a comedy. Shakespeare apparently used comedic stylistic cues to intensify the play's tragic aspects. Turns out that Shakespeare’s vocabulary and syntax varied wildly between his comedies, historical plays, and tragedies. In fact, according to a DocuScope insight, the funniest thing Shakespeare wrote was a portion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, while a passage from Richard II was the most serious.
Then again, in our age of “big data,” we can now visualize how our literary expressions differ and evolve over time. Take the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, comprising 425 million words of text from the past two decades, and compare it with equally large samples drawn from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, and transcripts of spoken English. The New York Times recently wrote how the COCA program detected patterns a human would never have found, such as which past-tense verbs show up more frequently in fiction compared with those showing up in academic prose.
And again, the same technology that analyzes unstructured data and turns it into computer-generated insights also can predict what may happen in the future, in the case of the Recorded Future platform, which is partially funded by the CIA and Google. I was a recent guest of the Recorded Future Webinar on the Future of the World Economy and Alternative Energy in 2012.
Recorded Future view
The Recorded Future looks at 100,000 Web pages an hour, scanning across 50,000 sources -- from Securities and Exchange Commission filings to Twitter comments. As discussed in this New York Times blog, it looks for statements about the future, like notices of an annual meeting or predictions about when a product might be released, and past developments, and then creates a “temporal index” that suggests momentum trends and unusually strong relationships between key players in a timeline in order to generate unusual insights.
The Recorded Future is not alone in generating insights. Companies such as Palantir Technologies attempt to visualize the world’s governmental and financial information, as well. Read this blog, for example, detailing Palantir's analysis of the recent turmoil in the Sudan. It performed the relational, temporal, statistical, geospatial, and social network analysis on more than a dozen open sources of intelligence data to gain a deeper understanding and insights around conflict, and how it might be resolved.
Yet another platform, Quid, aims to discover new opportunities through a “white space” analysis. The software will let you find “standout companies” within a sector and a sea of largely unstructured data, the company says.
The world is rapidly changing, that much is certain, and our ability to generate insights is about to take quantum leaps. Are you in?
I think when we're discussing business models, analytics can't help but play a positive role because it's a way of examining what's working and what's not. This doesn't change the need for creative leadership to look at the data and create a model from what they see or perhaps develop a creative business model and use analytics to test its effectiveness. But it should reduce the bias that can creep in when leadership fails to see the objective problems with these models. With these points in mind, I'd agree the benefits of using analytics to eliminate bias are huge.
@Shawn, perhaps we're arguing in circles, or maybe not arguing really at all, but I still maintain that "No" is the answer to your question -- "Could unbiased insight ruin a business model?" IMO unbiased insight -- ie, analytics, data, facts -- won't replace but enhance or complement many business models. It will take innovative leaders with good business understanding to take those unbiased insights and run with them.
All good points here, but I'm with Cordell on this one. I think what the technology shows is that Shakespeare used stylistic flourishes, mostly in terms of language, commonly associated with comedy, however, in structure and theme the play clearly falls within the genre of Elizabethan tragedy. See this overview of the basic plot elements of both styles from a college level document on the topic.
Well I also see Othello as a tradegy but it contains some hilarious acts as well. All in all I think we can catogorize it into the filed of Tragic Comedy :)
Well, agreed, though to be honest, while I can tell you Julius Ceaser was a tradagy - not as sure about Othello.
I went back to the original source, or horse's mouth, at Fast Company and this is what it said:
"In a late October presentation at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Library director Michael Witmore described his use of innovative data-mining methods to analyze Shakespeare's First Folio. The event was subsequently repackaged as a free podcast, and the ramifications are fascinating. By processing excerpts from the First Folio through word-analysis software, proof was found that Shakespeare's vocabulary and syntax varied wildly between his comedies, historical plays, and tragedies. More importantly, software analysis seems to prove that Othello--despite being a tragedy--was intentionally written with comedic stylistic cues that served to intensify the play's tragic aspects."
Later on in the article ..
..... Data-mining and computer-led textual analysis uncovered patterns in Shakespeare's work that a human observer, trained in traditional academic reading methods, would never see. Such as the fact that--in purely linguistic terms--Othello is a comedy.
"Comedy" in Shakespearean terms is quite different from our own conception of the genre. For the purposes of Shakespeare scholars (and English audiences of the Elizabethian era), comedies were considered to be plays that ended in weddings or which contained characters from multiple social strata. According to Witmore's analysis, the "worm's-eye view" provided by data-mining discovered that Othello was unusually rich in vocabulary usually only found in Shakespeare's comedic plays. In addition, data-mining analysis discovered previously unknown recyclings of aspects of Twelfth Night in Othello.
Not sure I buy that second point. I didn't read the article but I'm trying to get my head around Shakespeare's audience seeing Othello as a comedy rather than a tragedy. Maybe it's true (I'm no expert on Shakespearian lit) but it seems a stretch.
I think the article I got that information from also stated the common defination of a tradegy and comedy in Shakespere's time was somewhat different than what we think of those genres, today.
So there's a few parts to this theme -
- we, in our time, have relabeled and redefined what Shakespere meant - not alwyas accurately.
- also, the software went back and tried to uncover the real genre of Othello, and found it was a comedy - as defined in Shakesphere's time period and local, not ours.
Think of it this way - you have an old silver jug, it's all rusty, and you think the rust is part of the design - but then you put some silver cleaner on it- and it looks all new and shiny - and all of a sudden, like a different piece than what you thought of it originally - that is what software mentioned in my article did for Othello.
Alas, there's the rub, as the Bard himself might say. Othello, of course, was not a comedy, but the playwright used words and phrases associated with comedy for effect. Would our algorithm have known the difference without human interpretation to guide and interpret its results?
Actually, I see some serious advantages in the automation and aggregation of news and information that has freed up the flow of data and the power that access to that data has given common people in their daily lives. This is especially true when that technology uses a means that allows those consuming that data to choose the information they find most relevant and helpful outside of the control of an outdated and hierarchical information system. I just think that the human element here is critical and cannot be ignored as a partner with the technology used to help manage that data more efficiently.
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