Cover image: chart of the amount of news about each continents reported by BBC news website in July, 2007

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 way 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.

Description:This thesis 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 - Newsness Map, Keywords Chart and News Proximity Map.

News Coverage Map: quantitative data visualization of news coverage by country

Newsness Map: explore the common and distinctive newsworthy topics in different continents

Keywords Chart: explore the common and distinctive news topics, as well as the temporal pattern of news topics in different places.

News Proximity Map: analyze topic associations within a corpus of news articles

The work is an exploration of 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.

This thesis is relevant for research in information visualization, graphic design in digital media and online news archives.

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Context: MA thesis, Media Lab, Taik, Helsinki