Doom Haikus 2020

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!