This week was a season of growth for our team best characterized through milestones, triumphs, and valuable lessons. After the wake of the mid-term presentations, our team headed back to the drawing board to work out kinks in our poster, oral presentation, research, and paper. Individually, we made it a priority to focus on the inevitable conclusion of this program and the tools and deliverable’s that would then be available to our partners and the community. In order to ensure the longevity of the work we have produced for our project through this program we have decided to look not only to our resources as far as automation of code and already prepared scripts, but also the opportunity to inspire future Data Science for Social Good students participating in the program moving forward, pursuing an internship with the Atlanta food bank, or taking a special topics course for social good at Georgia Tech. By cleaning our code, providing documentation, and automating applicable tools and interactive applications, it will be significantly easier for our partners to maintain the provided deliverable’s and continue to see results in “real-time.”
Image: Proudly posing with our poster. (From left to right: Dorris, John, Miriam, Mizzani)
Looking toward the future, we are optimistic about the functionality of our project and we are proud that we were able to turn data into actionable information and meaningful story telling. The research that we have conducted over the course of this program with respect to past research conducted using topic modeling, deep learning or multi-aspect sentiment analysis of media coverage relating to food, public safety and health, is uncharted territory with endless paths and destinations. With our finding, we hope to inspire others that are interested in contributing to community organizations and small companies in visualizing their progress, public perception of their brand, and provide tangible analytics tools to improve their strategic planning, business decision-making, and tactical reporting.
As we continue to grow and sew into this project we look forward to adding additional practical functions, such as website metrics tracking traffic and real-time sentiment analytics, link topic modeling tools to the sentiment analysis tool, and finding the most effective and efficient way to cope with duplicate news articles. Adding these features will enhance to usability of the tools, and further encourage the user to stay engaged and comfortable with the interactive design. As we move closer to the end of the project we are determined to complete tasks and continue cleaning data, debugging code, geocoding articles to generate spatial statistics, ect. Although tedious and timely, manually geocoding our sources will enhance the accuracy of our results in terms of the location of news outlets from collected articles across the nation. We look forward to expanding our tool in the near future to cater to the food bank network at large and use data to contribute to the continued success of the Atlanta Community Food Bank and non-profit organizations across the globe.
Image: Current geocoding status of locations based on the collected articles. There are 1,600 articles in total that were collected using webhose.io in this sample.