Hacks/Hackers April Meetup

Finding and telling stories involving huge amounts of text is our rough theme for April.

6:00pm Arrive / Socialise / Grab a drink

6:30pm Angus Veitch: What do you do with 20,000 news articles? Using computers to scale mountains of text.

7:00pm More socialising / Drinks / Food

7:30pm 2nd presenter—tell us about your project (simon@elvery.net)?

8:00pm Close / Socialise

Sponsors

Hacks/Hackers is supported by a number of wonderful sponsors. Our presentation partner hub4101 (http://www.hub4101.com/) provides event support and does a great job of promoting innovation, creativity and digital technology in the 4101 postcode (http://www.hub4101.com/map/).

We're very pleased to have sponsorship for this event from ThoughtWorks (https://www.thoughtworks.com) (who provide food and drink) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (http://www.abc.net.au) (who provide our venue).

If you have any other questions or suggestions for this event or to make 2016 a great year for Hacks/Hackers Brisbane, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

You can email us ( simon@elvery.net or d.angus@uq.edu.au ) or get in touch via Twitter (@hackshackersbne (https://twitter.com/hackshackersbne)).

More on our April speaker

News organisations have amassed vast archives of news stories over the years, with much of the text accessible in digital form. Journalists and historians have traditionally engaged with such archives in a targeted manner, but there are also opportunities in studying this kind of data en masse. This talk will explore how computational text processing methods such as named entity recognition and topic modelling can help researchers and journalists to make sense of large volumes of text.

Angus is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. He is investigating how computational text analysis techniques can be applied to the study of public discourse, with coal seam gas development in Australia serving as a case study. He has previously worked on water-related policy and projects in Queensland’s Department of Natural Resources, and as a research assistant in the UQ Centre for Coal Seam Gas. He has also dabbled in the use of digital methods to explore environmental history, as documented in a website, http://oncewasacreek.org .