This summer, Africa’s Voices was lucky to have two computational linguistics interns join our team. Gladys Tyen built on a web-app for crowdsourcing sentiment analysis, and Lis Kerr worked on a governance project with Well Told Story. Here they share what they got up to, and the challenges and achievements along the way. Gladys: Let’s teach...
To draw meaningful insights from thousands of text messages in low-resource languages is difficult. To tackle this challenge, we’ve collaborated with the University of Cambridge to develop tools that help to streamline our data analysis approach. Here, Professor Alan Blackwell from Cambridge’s Computer Lab explains the inner workings of one such tool: CODA. CODA is...
Africa’s Voices researcher, Rita Zagoni, recently attended ‘Data Science Africa 2017’ in Arusha, Tanzania. The conference aims to encourage African researchers to engage with big data and real-time analytics for public good. A two-day workshop (20-21st July) invited participants to discuss the applications of data science methods to the African context, and Rita presented on...
The ICT4D Conference is one of the biggest annual events that brings together a motley crew of public, private, and civil society organisations to discuss all things related to technology in development. Over four days of presentations, workshops and panels, hundreds of participants from the humanitarian and international development community mingle together to share ideas...
On Monday 27 June, Africa’s Voices presented how we overcome three common challenges that many organisations working with citizen-generated data face. The presentation was broadcast online for DataShift’s community call (webinar). We discussed: how Africa’s Voices builds and sustains citizen engagement during interactive radio projects, how we gather and analyse local language data, without relying on translation,...
At Africa’s Voices, we deal with unstructured digital data from diverse and often marginalised members of East African societies. We are able to reach these citizens through interactive media and mobile technology, and analyse their input to help media and development organisations understand, engage with, and respond to their needs. This puts us in the...
Kavita Ramakrishnan, an Africa’s Voices researcher, helped Well Told Story to analyse thousands of text messages that the Kenyan media company had received from their fans on the topic of contraception. Here, Kavita reflects on a framework developed for this project that ensures unique voices don’t get lost in big data, and are considered a valuable asset to analysis. Harnessing meaning...
Interactive radio allows for new voices to be amplified across Africa. But, how can we listen carefully and make sense of these unstructured conversations? Further, any audience data that is collected will be skewed – because the voices are also skewed. Firstly, radio audiences are skewed in comparison to the population. In addition, those who choose to participate in...
