Over the process of participation in this year’s QS Reimagine Education Awards, I learned a number of things. The biggest of which, perhaps, is the power of a good story. Particularly in a competition of this type, where many many entries (said to be in the thousands) compete for a comparatively small number (dozens?) of awards.
Each entry probably submits hundreds to thousands of words. This is just in the submission document itself. Add to that supporting documents, web sites, etc. Multiply that by the number of entries. How many words are there to be processed? In these circumstances, having a solid project involving a large amount of effort which makes lasting impact may not be enough. How much can the judges even scan, read in detail, let alone verify, fact check?
Hence the importance of being able to tell a good story, in a quick way. A compelling story. A story that matches the expectations of the specific category of award. High concepts. Sympathetic characters. Touching moments. In just a few hundred words. Or less.
Yet if this business is considered not as a competition, but a case of information extraction, it is actually quite a common problem. How does one find useful information from an enormous amount of data? One way is to look for pools of data that are relatively simple to understand, yet which tells a coherent, compelling story. The method makes sense as a solution to information extraction.
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