Tag Archives: visualisation

Visualisation shows the topics New York Times journalists are writing about

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The Visual Communication Lab, part of the IBM Center for Social Sofware has created a site to provide a visualisation to show what subjects New York Times journalists are writing about.

NYT Writes, created by research developer Irene Ros, allows users to enter a subject and see a visualisation of the journalists who have written on that subject.

This post on the VCL blog explains what the visualisation shows.

There are a few things that you will see once the search is complete. First, on the left side of the screen you will see a stack of bubbles at varying sizes. Each bubble represents a term, or “facet”, that was used to describe one or more articles containing your search query.

Facets get manually attached to each article by the New York Times staff. An article about “Tsunami” might be tagged as being about “Natural Disasters,” for example. The size corresponds to the relative amount of times that tag appeared comparing to all the other facets collected from all other articles in the query set.

You can mouse over each bubble to see the tag name appear in the middle as well as how much it appeared relative to the other facets below the stack itself. This stack could also represent what I call a “dedicated writer” – someone who only writes about one topic for 30 days would have a similar stack to this one.

You can try out NYT Writes at this link

#ge2010: Times experiments with news and polls tracker

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As part of its election coverage the Times attempted to chart the relationship between the news agenda, represented by Times reports and articles, and the political parties’ perfomances in the polls.

It looks like this:

And works like this:

Each bubble in the above graph is a news story. Its size reflects the number of comments it received on our site, and its position (on the y axis) indicates the number of recommendations the story received. (The basic idea here is that, the higher and larger the bubble, the more ‘important’ the news story, assuming that larger, more important stories tend to get commented on and recommended more.) Colours show to which party a story relates. The lines show (depending on the tab) either Populus polling results, or the number of seats the parties were predicted to win during the campaign based on Ladbrokes odds, which are used elsewhere on the site.