Mapping the real
August 15th, 2007
There are some interesting services that exploit the power of data mining in the field of news and recent events. We all know sites like Google News, which have for a while used network power to find subtle (and more often not-so-subtle) connections between news items and link them together. Google News (and sites like it) are in my opinion revolutionary in how they find and utilize connections between real events. I often use the service to read the same story in several ways, attempting to go beyond the bias factor that creeps in to virtually all news reporting. There are often subtle distinctions in how stories are written that vastly alter the reality of the event to the reader.
It would be an interesting study to see how multiple versions of the same event through one of these services contribute to our understanding of history, and whether they help dilute the time necessary for an event to be understood from a historical perspective (Think of how we judge George W. Bush and the war in Iraq for instance whilst being inside the historical event, and whether this judgement is likely to change over time based on the ‘outcome’ of the war). In other words whether the connections and interplay between reportings of the same story help us judge history as it is happening.
Standing atop these services are other ones that map the news from a visual perspective. My personal favourite is Newsmap, which uses Google News to map stories and their importance. You will see stories in different colours, positions, and sizes, the differences in which are based on the recently and ‘chatter’ on particular news items. You can further filter the map based on preferences (by country, by type of news, etc). The genius of services like these make a mockery of our attempts to define them into categories such as “Web 2.0“.
Another ingenious visual take on online chatter is Universe by Jonathan Harris. He calls it our ‘modern mythology’, and in so doing transforms this chatter (news items, blogs, quotes, etc) into stars in the universe. The data mined links between them form the stars’ constellations, which you can play around with. It’s visually stunning and intellectually challenging, and something which deserves more ‘chatter’ in itself.