This is one example he gives of his automated writing:
"Second-seeded North Carolina was defeated in the Elite Eight with a 76-69 loss to fourth-seeded Kentucky in the Regional Finals in Newark."
That's perfectly serviceable. But it makes me wonder...what is the point of this? Not his automated-writing tool, but why are we putting what was meant for a statistical/symbolic graphic into sentence form?
This kind of writing is only possible with the collection of discrete datapoints: the date, the score, the participants, and the location. From there, you can do any kind of variation of subject-verb etc., even adding adjectives if the point spread is high.
So we're taking data and turning it into a less efficiently readable form. It's no fault of the auto-writer of course, that's just how we are taught to read and write. Someday, we move towards a society in which other forms of communication, particularly visual, are as commonplace. [insert your own Tufte-inspired rant here)
why are we putting what was meant for a statistical/symbolic graphic into sentence form?
Because many people (and other important constituents, like Googlebot) cannot read graphs and so perceive a graph as having zero value but a paragraph telling 1/10th the story of the graph as having positive value.
This is hardly the only "inferior form factor dominates because of ease of consumption" thing out there. For example, rather than look at an unemployment graph or read a paragraph beginning with "Government figures released earlier today say that unemployment is the highest it has been since 2004", most of the world prefers someone whose professional competence is looking pretty to read "Unemployment is up" to them for approximately 4 seconds before cutting to commercial.
That's perfectly serviceable. But it makes me wonder...what is the point of this? Not his automated-writing tool, but why are we putting what was meant for a statistical/symbolic graphic into sentence form?
This kind of writing is only possible with the collection of discrete datapoints: the date, the score, the participants, and the location. From there, you can do any kind of variation of subject-verb etc., even adding adjectives if the point spread is high.
So we're taking data and turning it into a less efficiently readable form. It's no fault of the auto-writer of course, that's just how we are taught to read and write. Someday, we move towards a society in which other forms of communication, particularly visual, are as commonplace. [insert your own Tufte-inspired rant here)