BBC #newsHACK: Applications of media monitoring to data journalism

News doesn’t just happen in one language and this hack gives you the chance to make the most of a brand new multilingual media monitoring and summarisation platform.

SUMMA - a pan-European project supported by Horizons 2020 - brings together cutting edge research in language technology, summarisation and content extraction

On behalf of the SUMMA consortium, BBC News Labs and BBC Connected Studio are hosting a hackathon to explore how a new EU-funded media monitoring platform can be best applied to the field of data journalism.

About SUMMA

Financed by the EU's Horizon 2020 fund, Scalable Understanding of Multilingual MediA (SUMMA) is a three-year project exploring the use of automation and algorithms to assist journalists monitoring foreign-language news.

The BBC is currently supplying a number of live news channels to the SUMMA platform for processing and is exploring ways in which SUMMA’s cutting edge technology can be used to support newsgathering in a real-world environment.  

The final product will be a media monitoring platform with functionality that includes (but is not limited to):

• story clustering based on the news that is trending around the world;

• entity extraction;

• automated transcription and translation of original news and broadcast items into English;

• automated summarisation of individual news items.

The Challenge

The SUMMA platform has aggregated a database of global news stories published in multiple languages, beginning August 2017. Participants will be asked to build a prototype that may be used by a data journalism team to make sense of the accumulated data.

We're looking for multi-skilled teams of academics, journalists and developers to build:

• visualisations that reveal patterns of interest from SUMMA’s data;

• tools for editorial teams to uncover stories from the SUMMA database API.

Participants will be provided with the SUMMA database API for the duration of the event. They may also make use of other technologies during the hackathon.

While judges will select winners in each of the categories, the primary nature of the event is for networking and collaboration.

*Interested participants must register in multi-skilled teams of two to six people to attend the event.  Teams MUST pre register to attend, we can not accept any on the day registrations for this event.*

If you have any questions, please email us at connectedstudio@bbc.co.uk

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