Press Releases

Amherst, MA, September 4, 2013 — Lexalytics, a leading provider of text and sentiment analysis software, announced its sponsorship of the Data Storytelling Hackathon, a Brighton Digital Festival event. The Hackathon is produced by NousPlan, a data science, data visualization, and rapid web application prototyping consultancy, and Big Data Brighton, an organization dedicated to hosting events on the subject of Big Data.

Artists, designers, software developers, and data scientists will attempt to explain the global financial crisis, one of the most baffling events of our time, using a collection of aggregated public data as well as analytic tools provided by Lexalytics and others.

“The goal is not only to find meaningful answers to these questions within the data, but to visualize them in a way that makes it easy to comprehend for anybody,” said organizer Peter Passaro, “There’s a story buried within all that data. We want to excavate it.”

Lexalytics has provided access to their powerful text analytics software, Salience, for the event. Salience is a versatile engine, capable not only of extracting important information from text, like named entities and general themes, but also providing one of the most accurate sentiment engines to date, making it easy to identify if what is being discussed is positive or negative, and to what degree.

“We’re excited to be a part of this event,” said Seth Redmore, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Lexalytics, “Salience’s capabilities make it perfect for analyzing this kind of data. Our software can take text from all sorts of sources, including social media, and tell you exactly what subject is being talked about, who the topic of discussion is, and how the writer feels about them. With the several years’ worth of data that the Hackathon is providing, Salience will be able to help find shifts in what and how things are being talked about in really meaningful and interesting ways. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.”

The big questions the Data Storytelling Hackathon hope to tackle include:

•  What caused the global financial crisis?
•  What effect has government response to the crisis had?
•  Has public and private spending changed since the crisis?
•  What are the long term effects on our society and how it operates?

The event will begin at 6pm on September 13th at the Brighton Fusebox on New England Street, Brighton, and will continue for 48 consecutive hours.