Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 06:36:43 +0000
<p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> This week's episode explores the possibilities of extracting novel insights from the many great social web APIs available. Matthew Russell's <a href="http://miningthesocialweb.com/">Mining the Social Web</a> is a fantastic exploration of the tools and methods, and we explore a few related topics.</p> <p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> One helpful feature of the book is it's use of a <a href="https://www.vagrantup.com/">Vagrant</a> virtual machine. Using it, readers can easily reproduce the examples from the book, and there's a short video available that will walk you through <a href="http://vimeo.com/72383764">setting up the Mining the Social Web virtual machine</a>.</p> <p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> The book also has an accompanying github repository which can be found <a href="https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition">here</a>.</p> <p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> A quote from Matthew that particularly reasonates for me was "The first commandment of Data Science is to 'Know thy data'." Take a listen for a little more context around this sage advice.</p> <p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> In addition to the book, we also discuss some of the work done by <a href="http://www.digitalreasoning.com/">Digital Reasoning</a> where Matthew serves as CTO. One of their products we spend some time discussing is <a href="http://www.digitalreasoning.com/uncommon-technology/intro-synthesys">Synthesys</a>, a service that processes unstructured data and delivers knowledge and insight extracted from the data.</p> <p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> Some listeners might already be familiar with Digital Reasoning from recent coverage in Fortune Magazine on their <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/08/14/digital-reasoning-cognitive-computing/">cognitive computing</a> efforts.</p> <p style="color: #224422; font-family: 'Lucida Bright', Georgia, serif; font-size: medium;"> For his benevolent recommendation, Matthew recommends the <a href="http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/">Hardcore History Podcast</a>, and for his self-serving recommendation, Matthew mentioned that they are currently hiring for <a href="http://www.digitalreasoning.com/careers">Data Science job opportunities at Digital Reasoning</a> if any listeners are looking for new opportunities.</p>
