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.
Excerpts
The Keywords Chart explores the common and distinctive news topics, as well as the temporal pattern of news topics in different places. In this visualization, we see news topics relating to the Middle East (highlighted axis) sorted by month, and news topics from the month of June sorted by continent (transparent axis). The design process is documented in chapter 4.3 of the thesis.
News Proximity Map analyzes topic associations within a corpus of news articles. The design is discussed in chapter 4.4 of the thesis.
An alternative sketch of the News Proximity Map.
The thesis focuses on discussing the subject of information visualization from a graphic designer's point of view. The field of information visualization has roots in multi-disciplinary research and practice. This work explores how graphic design can contribute to the field of information visualization, as well as to digital media in general. The work also examines some of the opportunities and limitations of digital media when it comes to facilitating graphic design and visual communication.