Ocean of Data Challenge: Exploring Ocean and Climate Text Data

Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship (COVE), DeepSense, and ShiftKey Labs are hosting the fourth Ocean Data Challenge, join us for some creative collaboration and idea generation! This free event will kick off virtually on Monday, February 13th at 6pm with an introduction to the Challenge, presentations from experts, and the chance to ask questions to help with idea exploration. Final presentations would be held virtually on February 27th at 6pm.

We are inviting students at post-secondary institutions across Atlantic Canada to use ocean data to dive into social media and explore the text and language used online when talking about the ocean and climate. The challenge runs for two weeks, allowing you to take your time, explore ways to learn about ocean data, meet others with the same interests and bring together unique skills to create a team (or work solo). This is a fantastic way to show off your design, programming or other talents. Not to mention more than $2,000 in prizes!

The Challenge

We are surrounded by text data. There is plenty of text about the ocean or climate change from social media, books, magazines, journal publications, and handwritten documents. Use this challenge to explore an aspect of data and share something insightful, shocking or simply informative.

Text analytics combines machine learning, statistical and linguistic techniques to process large volumes of unstructured text or text that does not have a predefined format to derive insights and patterns. This can include social media posts, image tags or written reports and emails. Text analytics is used for deeper insights, like identifying a pattern or trend from unstructured text. #ocean #climate

Traditionally our challenge has been broken down into three Challenge Streams: Under the Water, On the Water, and Above the Water. For this Challenge, we welcome the same themes but also encourage you to think about the range of methods to analyze text. Consider the sentiment, false facts, bullying, emotions or other aspects of speech analysis.

Individuals and teams will be asked to choose one stream and provide interdisciplinary ideas for helping understand or explore patterns within text data as it relates to the ocean or climate change.

Each stream can be used to explore different ways people communicate about aspects related to the ocean. For example: “Under the Water” can explore how people talk about observing fish while snorkeling or perceptions of offshore oil and gas, and “On the Water” can include people movement, and “Above the Water” can include a bigger picture view of the interactions.

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