Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Newsmap by Juan Dursteler In this issue of Infovis Juan Dursteler describes a fascinating graphical tool for the display of news flows around the world.  This tool will be of interest to webloggers and educators. It's appealing to imagine this kind of tool re-fashioned so that it could be applied to scholarly and scientific domains.  JH "Newsmap is an on-line application that presents the most relevant news of the moment, extracted from the Google news aggregator. The technology that newsmap uses is none other than the well known treemaps (see articles 51 and 52).  Newsmap visually codes each piece of news using several visual variables. Colour: different news sections use different basic colours. For example, green is reserved for technology and blue for business. Most recent news exhibits brighter colours while older ones appear darker.  Shape: each piece of news is shown within a rectangle, as is customary in treemaps.  Size: The size of the rectangle is proportional to the relevance of the news. Finally each piece of news is expressed textually as a clearly legible headline, particularly if the news is important and recent. In that case characters are big, since the size of the rectangle allows for it, and the colour is saturated accordingly to the age of the news. Newsmap retains another of the most searched for qualities in information visualisation, that is embracing the focus of our attention without losing the context (seeing both the forest and the trees simultaneously or, more technically speaking, focus + context)." 10:20:01 AM    COMMENT []