Visualization of Google News Data
This site provides a very nicely visualized representation of news topics broken down by country and topic. Color is used to show types of news (world business technology sports etc) and time passed since the story was published (darker is older). Size is used to represent the number links to that particular story. It’s a rather fun way to see what news media (online) considers important within a country as well as internationally.
This makes me think of the Dashboard mentioned at the end of lecture today. It provides a quick, easily understood view of information that is collected on-the-fly. It’s not great for keeping track of the news on a granular level. You cannot search from the site at all. I’ll stick with my personalized news feeds, but I check this daily to get a sense for what the rest of the world (at least a portion of it) is concerned with in comparison to the US (my own personal context).
A note from the author of the site “Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.”
For Example, as I look right now almost every country has something about Citibank fighting for Wachovia (after Wells Fargo’s bid), though Germany, France, and Spain care less than 1/2 as much as the rest. It can also show the context (bias?) each country uses to view a topic. Each country has an article about the Russian/Georgian ceasefire. The US article states Russia is accusing Georgia of harming the ceasefire. Everyone else states Russian is trying to “mend fence-posts”.