Mapping the News

Mapping the news is a very broad topic and is pervasive in every form of coverage. This includes weather reporting, news stories, geographic events (such as the recent earthquakes), and other forms where a visual representation can result in better understanding of the news. The most obvious uses for maps in the news are for weather, and dynamic maps can be seen every day behind the meteorologist. A good example of mapping news in a common way can be seen at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/flatpages/local/mappingthenews.html. The Seattle Times uses a GoogleMaps plugin to map the locations of their various news stories. This can help increase the understanding of why the events occur in relation to where they occur.

However, mapping the news does not just have to be limited to the linear “showing the location of something” formula. Marcos Weskamp,

a design engineer specializing in information visuali

zation, has created a remarkable program to map the news.

It is best understood in his own words,

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the

aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

Needless to say, this is an amazing piece of technology that is very interesting to use. The program runs in your browser and can be found at this url, http://newsmap.jp/

Give it a try! I spend quite a while looking at both national and international news and came across some very interesting articles.