Articles
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Articles tagged: bots
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Databae, Better Bots, and the Automation We Need Right Now
By Steven Rich and Aaron Williams
Posted onFind practical approaches to creating software to cover democracy, from a SRCCON 2017 session
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How Slack Controls Our CMS
By Andrew Briz
Posted onVisit the “Latest Stories” page. See what’s new. Copy the slug. Go to the collections. Click the right row. Paste the slug. Hit save. That was the multi-step process of adding a story to the homepage of the LA Times up until a few weeks ago. Now, you just click a button.
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Do News Bots Dream of Electric Sheep?
By Samantha Sunne
Posted onBots 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.
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When Bots Get Together: Part 2
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onHere’s the second half of our report-back from Austin’s code convening, introducing five more bot-centered open source projects from our participants.
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All Aboard the Twitterbot
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Posted onThe @choochoobot is a Twitter account that posts emoji trains sweeping through emoji landscapes. Here’s what it tells us about making bots these days.
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When Bots Get Together: Part 1
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onCode 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.
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Simbot, Give Me Five
By Yian Shang and Elena Zheleva
Posted onAt 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.
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Yo Dawg I Heard You Like Bots
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Posted onThe 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.
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What Is the Sound of PunditBot Yapping?
By Jeremy B. Merrill
Posted onThe 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.
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Peda(bot)gically Speaking: Teaching Computational and Data Journalism with Bots
By Nicholas Diakopoulos
Posted onBots 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.
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Welcome to Botweek 2016
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Posted onToday 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.
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Bot Benediction, 2015
By Ingrid Burrington
Posted onOur now-traditional #botweek closing peers inside our metaphors and the fragile magic of the bots we make, use, and love.
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Attack of the Helpful Chatbots
By Erin Kissane
Posted onA roundup of the little bots that make daily research and administrative tasks easier and more fun.
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The Strange Tale of FCCliefs
By Dylan Yep
Posted onIt started as a joke and turned into hashing through thousands of Net Neutrality comments the hard way, then building a chatbot to post them and interact with curious readers.
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Die, Bot, Die!
By Matt Waite
Posted onWhen and how to say goodbye to the bots when something has gone terribly wrong…or when no one’s really laughing anymore.
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Hi, Weatherbot!
By John Keefe
Posted onA Node-based Twitter bot, one easy step at a time—plus the way John Keefe teaches basic botmaking to class of journalism/design students.
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Mockingjay: A Smarter Repeater
By Michael Keller
Posted onMeet our Twitter bot that follows a list of users and retweets them when they mention a certain topic.
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Thank You, Electionbot
By Jacob Harris
Posted onOffloading some of a burden of continuous human monitoring to a friendly bot can be just the comfort you need on a cold Election Night.
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Bots with Thoughts
By Jacob Harris
Posted onJacob Harris on magic, aesthetics, and the newsbot frontier.
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A Botmaking Primer
By Joseph Kokenge
Posted onNot sure where to begin with this whole bot thing? Joseph Kokenge is here to help you get started with botmaking 101.
How We Made “Faces of Death Row”