Via @simonperry, news that AP will use robots to write some business stories (Automated Insights are one of several companies I’ve been tracking over the years who are involved in such activities, eg Notes on Narrative Science and Automated Insights).
The claim is that using algorithms to do the procedural writing opens up time for the journalists to do more of the sensemaking. One way I see this is that we can use data2text techniques to produce human readable press releases of things like statistical releases, which has a couple of advantages at least.
Firstly, the grunt – and error prone – work of running the numbers (calculating month on month or year on year changes, handling seasonal adjustments etc) can be handled by machines using transparent and reproducible algorithms. Secondly, churning numbers into simple words (“x went up month on month from Sept 2013 to Oct 2013 and down year on year from 2012”) makes them searchable using words, rather than having to write our own database or spreadsheet queries with lots of inequalities in them.
In this respect, something that’s been on my to do list for way to long is to produce some simple “press release” generators based on ONS releases (something I touched on in Data Textualisation – Making Human Readable Sense of Data).
Matt Waite’s upcoming course on “automated story bots” looks like it might produce some handy resources in this regard (code repo). In the meantime, he already shared the code described in How to write 261 leads in a fraction of a second here: ucr-story-bot.
For the longer term, on my “to ponder” list is what might something like “The Grammar of Graphics” be for data textualisation? (For background, see A Simple Introduction to the Graphing Philosophy of ggplot2.)
For example, what might a ggplot2 inspired gtplot library look like for converting data tables not into chart elements, but textual elements? Does it even make sense to try to construct such a grammar? What would the corollaries to aesthetics, geoms and scales be?
I think I perhaps need to mock-up some examples to see if anything comes to mind and that the function names, as well as the outputs, might look like, let alone the code to implement them! Or maybe code first is the way, to get a feel for how to build up the grammar from sensible looking implementation elements? Or more likely, perhaps a bit of iteration may be required?!
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
Interesting idea. The ggplot2 grammar is reminiscent of drawing 3D graphics: you have data representing 3D objects (points, polygons and texture data), a 3D computer representation via shifts and the addition of normals and textures, and a screen representation via transformations, clipping and rendering. That’s roughly: data, geoms and mappings, and finally aesthetics.
For text? The underlying text data might be transformed via mappings to connection graphs (algorithmic sense making) and geoms to represent the data as abstracted objects in the computer, and then those representations are translated to aesthetic mappings to bring the geometric elements to the screen.