What if, instead of gloomy news, we just had gloomy haikus? Would that be better?! This is a crowd-sourced, searchable collection of 2,700 haikus about 2020's top new stories.
Some people coped with 2020 by making banana bread or learning to play guitar. My de-stressor was making silly things with data. To that end, here's a silly dataset of news haikus and a simple explorer app to search and browse by theme.
Context:
Back in March, I was feeling overwhelmed with 2020's terrible news, and I asked myself: What if, instead of gloomy news... we just had gloomy haikus?! Wouldn't that be better?!
So I wrote a script to post each day's top news stories to Mechanical Turk, asking turkers to summarize each article as a haiku. It's been running (almost) all year. About ~2,000 people have responded and there are now ~2,700 haikus, forever memorializing the worst year of our lives, as anxious sets of 5, 7, 5 syllables.
You might ask (rightly): Why would anyone need this? Mild entertainment? Masochistic nostalgia? An unusual dataset for text summarization? I'm honestly not sure, but it was fun to make!
Doom Haikus 2020
Doom Haikus 2020