2013 – Sorry for the Spam / The Adventures of Dan Schultz Thu, 04 Feb 2016 02:17:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.2 Opened Captions /project/opened-captions/ Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:46:45 +0000 http://192.241.162.137/?post_type=project&p=2345 Long Description

You may have heard of closed captions before: they’re the little words that show up at the bottom of TVs in airports, bars, or maybe at home when you mute the TV. Opened Captions scrapes those captions and regurgitates them into something called a web socket (web sockets take data and pass it along to anything willing to listen.) The service can take in caption data directly from a USB, or from another opened captions server.

This project came from my Knight-Mozilla fellowship at the Boston Globe during the 2012 elections. We were brainstorming innovative ways to cover the presidential debates, and quickly realized that the best of them required a way to know what was being said in real time. I got to work looking for solutions and, finding none, decided to make my own. A few days later and Opened Captions was born.

Although we didn’t end up building any official Boston Globe coverage, I did manage to throw together a wonderful project called DRUNK-SAPN. The application streamed the debates and told the world to drink on key phrases. Most importantly, the transcript took shots along with the players. You can view the transcript here.

Papers, Posts, and Press

Technologies

  • Node.js
  • Socket.io

Testimonials

h*hic*Tey brougttth*hic* su binder*hic*s ffflul fo wmoen.
– Mitt Romney

]]> CivOmega /project/civomega/ Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:45:37 +0000 http://192.241.162.137/?post_type=project&p=2344 Long Description

CivOmega makes it easy to convert government data and APIs into resources for people who didn’t spend half their lives learning to program. For instance I made it possible to ask the question “What bills are about [X]” where X can be any phrase you want. Behind the scenes CivOmega knows how to go out and talk to the appropriate datasets at which point light shines down from the heavens and angels sing to you about congress.

Lots of data has been published, but it’s hard for non-technical constituents to benefit from it. Now, thanks to CivOmega, when a new dataset is released to the developer community, someone could spend a few extra hours to unlocking all sorts of new questions and answers through CivOmega.

The system is built in Python, and the first version of this was created during a 24 hour hackathon at the MIT Civic Media Conference in 2013. Since then it has been rewritten with a more attention to code quality and extensibility thanks to a grant from the Sunlight Foundation.

A CivOmega module is made up of three parts:

  1. Question patterns. These patterns are used to guide a user to questions that the system knows through the main CivOmega interface. When a user asks a question that fits that pattern, CivOmega creates a structured object and passes it to the module that knows the answer. (Example: { “politician”: “John McCain”, “issue”: “Campaign Finance” })
  2. Mapping Logic. Custom logic takes the structured data extracted from a pattern by CivOmega and uses it to look up answers. (Example: using the Sunlight Foundation’s congress API to get a list of all bills about Campaign Finance that were supported by John McCain.)
  3. Answer Templates. The result of that search is packaged and sent to an HTML / JavaScript / CSS template, which renders the answer in whatever format is most appropriate (as determined by the module author).

Papers, Posts, and Press

Technologies

  • Python
  • jQuery

Testimonials

Oh good, answers to questions I’ll never ask.
– The American Public

]]> NewsJack /project/newsjack/ Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:43:18 +0000 http://192.241.162.137/?post_type=project&p=2343 Long Description

NewsJack was built as a class project for Sasha Costanza Chock‘s “Introduction to Civic Media.” It enables détournement using web technologies. For those of you who don’t speak French / Chinese / Whatever that is, it means “turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself.” It’s a very specific form of satire that takes subversive messages and wraps them in a skin that you are used to seeing (this might mean brand, it might mean medium, it might mean something completely different). Good détournement forces the viewer to question their world and their expectations.

The specific inspiration behind NewsJack is the Yes Men’s New York Times Special Edition. This fake paper was actually printed and handed out on the streets of New York City in 2009. It looked like a real copy of the Times, but had headlines like “IRAQ WAR ENDS” and “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds.” Imagining picking up a newspaper that you believed was the New York Times and seeing that type of headline. For a moment, until you realized what was going on, it might change the way you see your world.

That’s the experience that I ultimately wanted to enable online, where content is far harder to modify and spread for anyone who doesn’t know how to code. It is built using a modified version of a Mozilla tool called Hackasaurus. The original code was designed to help people learn HTML (the core building block of the Internet). I stripped out all that hippie foo foo learning crap and left the essence: code that makes it possible to edit a website by pointing and clicking.

Once you’re done you can hit publish, and a copy of the page you just modified is uploaded to some server out in the universe. You get a URL to share around, and suddenly your remix is alive and kicking.

You might say to yourself: “… how is this legal?” to which I would respond by picking up a copy of the first amendment, making a paper airplane out of it, and throwing it at your head. Of course, that didn’t stop the New York Times from sending a cease and desist on the first day we launched the site! I suppose that’s a story for another time.

Papers, Posts, and Press

Technologies

  • jQuery
  • MySQL
  • PHP

Testimonials

I have a feeling our lawyers will be particularly interested in this project.
– Every Mainstream Media Source

]]> The Ononeon /project/the-ononeon/ Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:40:46 +0000 http://192.241.162.137/?post_type=project&p=2342 Long Description

The Onion is an amazing satirical newspaper, which I suggest you read if you don’t already. It features headlines such as Michele Bachmann Figures Why Not, Introduces Homosexual-Beheading Bill or New Obesity Drug Delicious. In case you couldn’t tell, these headlines are fake.

But not with The Ononeon. The Ononeon is updated every day with new headlines that look like they should be from The Onion, but sadly are not. Like China Censors the word Censorship, or Phillies fan covers face with shirt; proceeds to drink beer through shirt.

I built the site with Matt Stempeck because he was about to lose control of the URL and we wanted an excuse for him to pay for another year of it. Plus we had four hours of free time. To this day it is by far our most popular project.

It works by hijacking the top rated headlines curated by the /r/nottheonion, a community that finds headlines and news articles that look like they should come from the satirical paper. For each headline our script runs an automatic google image search and saves the top image. After that takes a cloned copy of The Onion website’s layout and design and replaces all the old fake headlines with our new real ones.

The beauty of all this from an academic perspective is that it uses a blend of human curation and algorithmic search to create a pretty damn effective satirical experience. From all other perspectives it is purely hilarious.

Papers, Posts, and Press

Technologies

  • PHP
  • Reddit

Testimonials

Kick them out of school
– Steve Hannah, Onion CEO

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