• TrackMaven's Monthly Challenge is a chance to experiment with new technologies and explore creative projects. Each month, we will name a general topic, a new technology, or something in between. We'll collect a few resources and examples to get you started, then it's up to you; make something interesting! Each month, we'll meet up to share rapid-fire presentations, as raw or as polished as you'd like. 
  

  Our first topic is Elasticsearch, an incredibly powerful search and analytics engine. We've set up a post on how to get startedhere. A few possible ideas...

  • Provide real-time text search over a large corpus (ie, some subset of Project Gutenburg, a bunch of product reviews, etc.)

  • Beyond search, analysis of a large set of text: determine similar authors based on vocabulary, compare word usage over time using Google Books data, or see what stands out in the language of spammy emails

  • Task logging and visualization of results with Logstash and Kibana, the Elasticsearch "ELK" stack

  • Data analyses using aggregations on any sort of tabular data: financial records, movie reviews, census results...

  • Find unusual patterns in weather data or crime data by location

  • Make a better real-time Twitter search by combining Elasticsearch with NLP on Twitter's streaming API

  We're looking forward to seeing what you create!