ContentMining Hackday in Cambridge and the Shuttleworth Foundation

An exciting week for the ContentMine team last week in Cambridge. The team met up in person on Thursday for lunch at the Panton Arms. An appropriate choice bearing in mind where the Panton Principles were drafted ! We were also pleased that one of our Advisory Board members, Joe MacArthur was able to join us for that. Additionally, we were thrilled to be joined by Helen Turvey, the Executive Director of the Shuttleworth Foundation who provide us with invaluable support. This was a great opportunity for the whole team to meet in person and discuss the project both generally and philosophically. After we finished lunch, time for a quick photo-shoot ! Next up, a brisk walk over to our HQ for the next day and half at the fabulous Makespace. Also joining us, was another Advisory Board member, Laura James who is also Makespace’s Co-Founder and Director. The afternoon was more technically orientated as we took Helen through some ContentMine demos and had related discussions in that regard. Before Helen left us, she had the unique opportunity to have some hands on time with our latest recruit…..  KAIA !!! Helen was genuinely fascinated by the project and described it as “Fantastic“, “Exciting” and “Fixing Broken Science” !! The following day was a full on hack-day from 09:00 to 17:00. The team were joined by a number of local students. As per the event page:- “This is open to anyone interested in developing tools and expertise in automatic mining of information from the scholarly literature. Please register so we can anticipate numbers (probably max 20) and alert security. Topics include chemistry, crystallography, metadata and licences, biological species, phylogenetics, and clinical trials – or bring your own wishlist. No formal experience, but bring your own laptop and a sense of adventure”. We live-streamed most of the morning and two of the afternoon sessions. Here is the archived video from the morning. After an excellent pizza lunch beak, the afternoon session commenced. Apart from general hacking, we had two impromptu and rich, important and possibly novel discussions around copyright and text and data mining. The first was a session namely (but not only) featuring another of our Advisory Board in the form of Charles Oppenhiem and also Richard Danbury. Some of the audio on that recording is unclear, but we also recorded an audio only version too. Shortly after that, we had our second discussion around copyright and text and data mining. This time, Charles was joined by Yvonne Nobis, Head of Science Information Services, Central Science Library, Betty and Gordon Moore Library, Cambridge University. Others also contributed. Again, we also recorded an audio only version. All in all, a most positive two days in Cambridge. We’ll be back !! Graham Steel Community Manager ContentMine