Overview is an open-source document analysis and visualization system originally developed at the Associated Press for investigative journalists. It’s been used to report some of the biggest investigative stories of the last few years. We’re looking for a developer to extend the software to analyze millions of scraped syllabi for the Open Syllabus Project.

You will help us put 2 million scraped syllabi online, do natural language processing to extract citations from each syllabus, and build visualizations to do citation analysis. We want to see what people are actually teaching for each subject, and how this changes over time, and make this type of analysis widely available to researchers. We’re looking for someone to build out Overview to support this, growing our team from three to four people. This is an ideal job for a programmer with visualization, natural language processing, digital humanities or data journalism experience.

The project is Scala on the back and Coffeescript on the front, but you’ll more often be writing plugins in Javascript and doing data pre-processing in whatever works for you. We’re looking for a full stack engineer who can extend the back end infrastructure to process the syllabi, then build the UI to make all this data accessible to users. You’ll be working within a small team of professionals who will quickly get you up to speed on the core codebase and the plugin API you will use to create visualizations. Everything you write will be released under the AGPL open source license.

This is a six-month contract position to begin with. We hope to extend that, and we’d be especially excited to find someone who wants to grow into a larger role within our small team. We’re a distributed team based out of NYC, remote friendly, flexible hours.

Contact me here if interested.