The ideas of Digital Humanities are slowly becoming popular outside of the Digital Humanities cult. An article was published in the Wall Street Journal presenting an app made by Nick D’Aloisio. Seth Stevenson (2013) notes that D’Aloisio, now eighteen, sold a piece of software to Yahoo! for $30 million at the age of seventeen (para 1). Stevenson’s headline reads,
“How Teen Nick D’Aloisio Has Changed the Way We Read” (2013). Many people many begin to wonder what kind of software created by a seventeen year old could be worth $30 million. How can his app change the way we read? Do we want this change, and who purchased the software? D’Aloisio sold his software, Summly, to Yahoo!. Summly is an application that summarizes news articles into a shorter text that is more readable. Overall, Summly is another tool that can be used for distant reading.
Summly predecessor, Trimit, is similar. However, as I tested it, I found that this software does has some downfalls. One problematic feature was that there was a word limit. The maximum word allowance is one thousand words. This limitation made using Trimit difficult. I put the Wall Street Journal article about D’Aloisio’s sell to Yahoo! into Trimit. The article is 2,346 words long, and although Trimit said my entry was over, it allowed me to trim the text down to 258 words. The Trimit summary reads:
While D’Aloisio spends 80 percent of his work time retooling and improving Summly (which has already been integrated in Yahoo!’s iPhone app), the other 20 percent is devoted to imagining the expansive challenges he’ll take on next. When he released an early iteration, tech observers realized that an app that could deliver brief, accurate summaries would be hugely valuable in a world where we read everything – from news stories to corporate reports – on our phones, on the go. When he wasn’t programming or doing schoolwork, D’Aloisio began to fill his spare time reading about natural language processing. A year later, Summly launched, and within a month it had attracted 500,000 users and became the number-one news app in 28 countries. When I met him, he was about to head to Greece for a weeklong vacation with a pack of high school pals. D’Aloisio is not working full time in Yahoo!’s London office, and his youth, his energy and his undeniable it-factor have brought the formerly musty tech giant a much-needed injection of cool. He’d never met with anyone in the tech world face to face, and the information he’d listed when he registered Trimit spoke only vaguely of a London technology company. I feel really bad when I’m not doing something new.
I was extremely impressed. This summary got the most important facts in the article and had trimmed the two thousand plus words by about 90%. Although this feature is exciting, there are some downfalls to the technology. While all the sentences can be found within the text, the organization is jumbled. Therefore, the rhetorical choices of the author are not used in the presentation to the reader. The final sentence was a quote by D’Aloisio, but the quote was not in the correct context for readers to recognize it as a quote. Finally, sections of the story, that give D’Aloisio character, are missing from the shortened text. This lack of information leaves the reader without a good sense of who D’Aloisio is.
This introduction to D’Aloisio’s software makes it seem that this is new technology. Summly is not new technology. Rather, it is just old technology repackaged in a way that makes it usable to an individual with no background in coding. Yahoo! is not even using this technology in a way that introduces the masses to digital humanist ideas. Rather, Yahoo! is using the software to summarize the news articles on their news center, giving their consumers shortened news articles instead of the full-size articles found on other news sites. While this technology is good and encourages people to keep up with the news, the downfalls indicate that the technology isn’t perfect yet. The algorithms used by D’Aloisio during the creation of Summly, do not bring in the smaller details that give a broader picture. As a result, Summly could produce bias in its readers. Perhaps summarizing will always result in biased reading. Either way, this tool needs to be used wisely, especially in political news stories, where bias can cause larger problems.
Full article located: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303376904579137444043720218
Questions to the Class:
- How do you think Summly will alter the way that people receive their news? Is this way good or bad?
- If you read the Wall Street Journal article, how do you think the Trimit summary compares?
- What other dangers are produced by used tools like Summly to relate news to citizens?
- For comparison, see the Voyant word cloud of the same article. Does it say anything different about the subject?