When Narrative Science inks a deal with a new client, their writers begin work customizing the existing platform within a configuration layer. House style—how to format names and dates, when to italicize, and so on—is the easy part. What takes more time is establishing the facts and inferences that will conceivably be drawn from client data, as well as a "constellation" of possible story angles through which the data might be presented. In the case of baseball, this means "all the scenarios that might be derived from the raw data of a box score": the slugfest, the shutout, the pitcher's duel, the back-and-forth, postponed by rain, on and on.

In this way, Narrative Science writers don't think about specific stories as much as they outline a web of story possibilities. "They know how to configure our technology to allow them to become what are essentially meta-journalists," Frankel told me, "people who can write millions of stories opposed to a single story at a time." As the technology progresses, we may see more and more writers working on this macro level.

WE RECOIL FROM THE DULL

But using Narrative Science to write baseball games is a little like hammering a nail with an atom bomb. The platform's inference engine, Hammond says, is supported by "hardcore data analytics"—it can handle vast, truly complex information, data sets that would boggle any human mind. In this regard, the platform may one day serve as a kind of all-star assistant for human journalists.

Imagine, for instance, the prospect of deducing how Twitter users feel about the Republican presidential candidates on a particular day. A human journalist simply couldn't do it—trying to monitor any significant sample size would be impossible. Twitter moves so fast, and at such a high volume, that it eludes us. The problem with social media," Hammond writes on his blog, "is that there's so damned much of it."

But Narrative Science is beta-testing an initiative that can monitor all of Twitter for trends in content, using the Republican contenders (for now) as their frame. "Newt Gingrich has been consistently popular on Twitter, as he has been the top riser on the site for the last four days," the platform reported in February. "While the overall tone of the Gingrich tweets is positive, public opinion regarding the candidate and character issues is trending negatively. In particular, @MommaVickers says, 'Someone needs to put The Blood Arm's 'Suspicious Character' to a photo montage of Newt Gingrich. #pimp.'" Sure, it's a little dry. But this kind of holistic perspective, in the future, will be useful for human writers (not to mention advertisers) as we try to wrangle social media sandstorms into something we can hold.

Now consider how valuable this kind of data-combing could be for investigative journalists. In his novel The Pale King, the late David Foster Wallace argued that the era of secrecy is over: The post-Watergate government hides secrets in plain sight, obscuring them in an unchartable morass of freely available information. The result? We lose interest, civilians and journalists and activists alike.