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/Mapping the recent past

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Overview

Through the Internet we are exposed to information and stories about places we have never been to, events we have not personally experienced. In a sense the function of online news is not only to report on current events, but also to build up some common memories of the "recent past", the past that is too recent to be recorded in history books.

The project is about studying online news archives through design and visual representation. For the design work, I have chosen to focus on a case study: the archives of BBC online news. Two experiments were carried out: a quantitative data visualization of news coverage by country - News Coverage Map, and a set of visualizations of the textual contents of the news articles - the Newsness Map, the Keywords Chart and the News Proximity Map.

Read The Thesis [pdf]

Context

The project was my Master's Thesis work, done at Media Lab Helsink in 2007. This thesis is relevant for research in information visualization, graphic design in digital media and online news archives.