New York Times Innovation Portfolio
tags: info graphics new york times NYT API sentiment analysis visualization
posted by Zeke Shore on Mar 2nd, 2010
The New York Times online consistently delivers interesting data visualizations to help enrich the stories surrounding popular news topics. The New York Times Innovation Portfolio provides a beautiful overview of all of these interactive explorations, organized by topic with project overviews, documention, and links to the actual interactive pieces.
Since VoxPop is working with New York Times data, this collection of existing data visualizations is a treasure trove of strong precedents, several of which relate very closely to our project. Here are a handful that live within the realm of reader sentiment.
Health Care Debate is a conversation platform that allows users to discuss various issues within the health care debate. The most interesting aspect of this tool is how the relevance of specific sub-topics within the debate can be instantly comprehended at first glance, with the surface of the tool depicting multiple “rooms” that are scaled relative to the number comments relating to that subtopic.
This interactive video of Obama’s speech to the Muslim world allows users to provide comments along the timeline of the speech, allowing a global discussion to unfold in the context of the time-based content that is seeding the discussion.
Election Word Train asked New York times readers to share one word that describes their current state of mind on the day of the 2008 presidential election. Much like a tag cloud, words are scaled relative to the number of people sharing the sentiment, and can be filtered to show words shared by Obama or McCain supporters. By leveraging scale and letting these words ’speak for themselves’ does effectively provide a general glimpse of reader sentiment, even if the forum is is somewhat contrived, specifically with the goal reducing group sentiment into a few dozen words, possibly hindering truly organic sentiment visualization.
Inaugural Words ranks the frequency of words used by presidents in Inaugural Addresses, showing what words each president used the most. While is not really reflecting reader sentiment. it does show an interesting break down of word frequency across time and political position.
The Twitter Bowl interactive visualization maps twitter chatter over the course of the 2009 Super Bowl, according to key topic mentions. This hits an interesting cross section of communicating time, space, and group sentiment, even if it is somewhat cryptic in what is actually being communicated. There is something very satisfying about seeing topics grow and shrink geographically over time, although it does not reveal what specifically about “steelers” or “ads” or “springsteen” people are sharing.
These projects all have several aspects that worth analyzing and building upon. As we begin to re-think how people engage with the news, its exciting to see major players like the New York Times continuing to push the envelope, and continue to keep their data open so that others can do the same.
