ShowTimeLine! Hackathon on timeline visualizations at @HacksHackersBA
We believe that software can be used to tell stories in ways unthinkable for traditional journalism. Several journalists, designers and software developers related with Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires are working on projects where they need to visualize data in time lines. We need tools to develop automatic or semi-automatic timelines that could be combined with other variables, to gather valuable insights from the data.
Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires proposes to build new applications (like this one above) that can help visualize data “over time”. These applications could be used in both simple and complex projects, by journalists and others in the communications industry. Submit here.
Saturday 14th april 2012, from 10 am to 8 pm at Areatres, Malabia 1720 11B: in Fuentes de Malabia behind Starbucks, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In April 2011, we opened the local group of Hacks/Hackers in Buenos Aires. Our meetings were attended by journalists, software programmers and designers. There are currently 560 members in the local group. We have already held four meetups, four hackathons, a conference, and a webinar with Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), and we are proud to have the support of Knight-Mozilla Open News, a program to build a new ecosystem for the open web.
Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires is currently involved on three DataJ projects:
Mapa76.info, a software project that extracts data from text documents and presents the stories in timelines and maps. (By the way you can vote us at Knight #newschallenge)
Malvinastreinta.com.ar, an interactive platform that recreates the day by day acts of the Malvinas War between England and Argentina in 1982. April 2 is the 30th anniversary of this war, and the government has released the Rattenbach report.
Sex trafficking, a project that analyzes journalistic and judicial documents on sex trafficking and its victims, including the case of Marita Veron, a victim who is still missing after 10 years.
Exportable ideas: we believe these projects are of interest to journalists, the media, organizations, and designers who can use applications to generate simple and complex timelines in a variety of projects. It is not easy to find open platforms for generating timelines, especially given that it is complex to implement them into existing projects. The main proposal (The “Lord of the Rings”) is intended to serve as a research tool to find relationships difficult to analyze by conventional reading. Although we are currently focused on the projects described above, we are also open to other projects.
What do we expect to achieve?
By the end, we hope to start seeing the results of the displays, the journalists and programmers becoming familiar with the concepts previously announced. And to make the magic work. The idea is to move forward with the original three projects. More instructions here.
The organizers of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires are Mariano Blejman (Página/12), Martin Sarsale (Sumavisos), Guillermo Movia (Mozilla Argentina), Cesar Miquel (EasyTech), Mariana Berruezo, Sergio Sorin, Ezequiel Clerici and Andrés Snitcovsky (we can blame him for this idea). English editor of this post: Beatrice Murch.
Sponsorship: Knight-Mozilla Open News, Mozilla Foundation, AreaTres, Página/12, Vurbia Technologies, LaNacion.com, Globant and Sourcefabric
Twitter [@HacksHackersBA
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