In a few short years, we've learned to delegate all manner of tasks to computers. For music recommendations or driving directions or academic scouring, we readily turn to our clever machines. They do it better most of the time, and with much less effort.
Now computers have proven competence—no, fluency—in yet another aspect of human life: writing. Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup, has developed an innovative platform that writes reported articles in eerily humanlike cadence. Their early work focused on niche markets, clients with repetitive storylines and loads of numeric data—sports stories, say, or financial reports. But the underlying logic that drives the process—scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts—is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data, Narrative Science founders say, their software can generate a prose analysis that's robust, reliable, and readable

Read more

It came up this week with this map on poverty and deprivation in London, part of our London: the data series. Recently we've been using the colour scale on the map below, which is a variation on the famous traffic light collection of colours - for the Guardian, this tends to go from green, meaning good, or low - up to red, meaning bad or high. It's used by map makers and newspaper designers all the time. But is it any good?
Read more