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Exploring news visually

October 17, 2016 by Joyce Valenza 1 comments

News junkie alert! Check out IBM Watson’s News Explorer, a fascinating semantic strategy for navigating up-to-the-minute news, and lots of it.

News Explorer presents and connects 300,00 articles a day from 70,000 sources including newspapers, radio and Twitter–visualizing this vast textual content into entities and concepts.

The application uses Watson’s AlchemyData News API and allows searchers to explore real-time news stories by identifying topics, people, companies, organizations, and locations in their content through a variety of visualizations.

News Explorer’ home page presents an overview of news, sharing trending queries, popular topics in a variety of categories, and the big stories of the day.

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Users can navigate breaking news topics by maps, a word cloud, and a timeline spanning five days.

Advanced queries allow news searchers to explore connections between terms in the context of a wide variety of categories and to further filter it in the fields of people, companies, or organizations.

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The example below explores news connecting Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Barack Obama.

The Panta Rhei –River of News literally presents a scannable flow of article titles. Title size represents the prominence of the article. Title brightness represents positive article sentiment. When a user clicks on a River of News article, they see its relationship to current events in News Explorer.

You may also be interested in:

Unfiltered News: offers access to Google News data across languages and locations to find global stories and perspectives that may not be covered in your location.

Newsmap: a clustered visualization approach that displays news in bands revealing levels of coverage and patterns in reporting across regions of the globe and time. National tabs allows for comparisons of coverage across countries.

US News Map: The collaborative project designed by Georgia Tech Research Institute and eHistory.org at the University of Georgia . allows users to search over eleven million newspaper pages from between 1789 and 192 and visualize results across space and time. Content comes from Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers and the project is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

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Filed under: news, search tools, searching, visualization

About Joyce Valenza

Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza

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