Making sense of a COVID-19 world

NGI Forward Webinar – Making sense of a COVID-19 world: applying collective intelligence to big data.

As we at NGI Forward watched SARS-CoV-2 cut into our worlds, we felt the same as everybody else. We feared for loved ones, and for the long-term freedom and prosperity of our societies. We felt powerless, and anxious in the face of uncertainty. We still do.

But, at some point along the way, we realized there was something we could do. We have in our midst a team of data scientists. When the pandemic hit, Kristof and Michal were analysing trends in the evolution of Internet technology. Theirs is a big data method: they do text analysis on large repositories of academic papers, news articles, social media. We realized we could use the same method to investigate the virus and its companion illness. It would be like redirecting our searchlight onto a new target.

So we did that. In the space of only a few weeks, Kristof and Michal came back with results, neatly arranged in an interactive website. And that’s where we need your help.

In this webinar, we will get together and question the data. Let’s look at them, turn them around in our heads, interrogate each other on their possible meaning. Let’s formulate hypotheses, and see if we can think of ways to test them. Kristof and Michal can transform them into queries and visualization in real-time, or close enough. In other words, let’s augment big data analysis with collective intelligence methods. It will be a way for us to learn more about both COVID-19 and this particular big data methodology.