Gilad Lotan, Chief Data Scientist at Betaworks, describes the human-curated taxonomy powering Giphy's search engine at Data Driven NYC.
Disclosure
Lotan: Betaworks was an early investor in Tumblr and Kickstarter
“So we were one of the earliest investors in Tumblr and Kickstarter, and a whole bunch of, ah, companies across, ah, the tech scene in New York City.”
Assertion Partly supported
Lotan: TweetDeck was built at Betaworks and sold to Twitter
“TweetDeck was actually built at Betaworks and then sold to Twitter.”
Insight
Lotan: Gephi is ideal for quick exploratory graph analysis
“It's a great tool to pull in graphs and do some exploratory data analysis, so the section where you're sort of trying to explore a data set, you don't want to put too much effort into it and build something for it, you can just easily use this open source tool…”
Insight
Lotan: Network graph analysis effectively isolates spam and off-topic data
“And it's actually also a great way to get rid of spam, things that aren't related not that I think that Python snakes are spammy, because they're pretty awesome, but it's a way to sort of, to identify them as separate from the context that we're trying to unde…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Giphy's top tag clusters in 2013 were funny content, art, and movies
“We get three dominant sort of clusters in this data, and it's, I don't think it's surprising There's the lol, right, lots of just funny, funny stuff. There's, like, kind of pretty, beautiful content, like photography, just artistic stuff, and then lots of movi…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lotan: Giphy GIFs tagged 'funny' feature laughing people, while 'LOL' features animals
“Content that has the tag funny usually consists of sort of people laughing here, like funny in terms of funny, they're, you know, you see their face and you see them laughing. LOL tended to have, for some weird reason, have animals doing weird stuff. Or young …”