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Investigative journalists from the platform Follow the Money want to find out how connected Shell and the Dutch government are. By invoking the Government Information (Public Access) Act (Wob), Follow the Money has acquired large quantities of communication documents. The documents include emails, memos, policy documents and even WhatsApp messages sent by the government to or that are about Shell. How can such an abundance of documents be sifted through as quickly as possible? For this purpose, Rens van de Schoot, professor of Statistics for Small Data Sets at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, has organised .

 

We will use our software to sift through the so-called Shell papers as efficiently as possible.

How do you find exactly what you are looking for in thousands of documents, without having to read them all? With his Open Source project Van de Schoot has developed smart software for combing through large data sets quickly and efficiently. The software was originally developed for going through systematic reviews in the scientific literature. The professor published an article about this in the journal . Van de Schoot: "But the software can essentially handle all kinds of texts. Therefore, we will now use our software to help Follow the Money sift through the so-called Shell papers as efficiently as possible. With our hackathon, we will help the journalists' platform find relevant documents more quickly by using active learning instead of reading all documents indiscriminately."

26 to 28 November

The hackathon will take place online from the evening of Friday, 26 November to the afternoon of Sunday, 28 November. Van de Schoot says that anyone who is interested is "You can adhere to your own schedule at the weekend: you obviously don't have to ‘hack’ all weekend long if you don't feel like it." The Utrecht professor believes that the hackathon is also aimed at helping the participants improve their skills. “And it's a good way to improve your Open Science skills, as we will be developing everything publicly through . It's also a fun way to meet new people, such as the data journalists from FTM, or our own experts from the open science programme."

The hackathon is also the launch of the Special Interest Group Active Learning (SIG-AL), which falls under both the Applied Data Science and Human-centred AI focus areas. "With this new SIG, we are bringing all aspects of Active Learning together. And everyone is welcome to join us."