Newswire Crossword- Data Viz Play

I originally wanted to focus on how:
-People are on their cell phones a lot
-People leading busy lives having little time
-Information overload [amount of of new data generated in 2005 was many orders of magnitude
greater than the whole library of congress, several exabytes created, nearly 37,000 times more]
-How to make information fun
-Serendipity of finding interesting articles

I am still learning as3, so my first prototype is limited, only showing newswire headlines and
how long the article would take to read (iphone app in mind). I focused on the aspect of
time to read articles. For example, you might be waiting in a long line and only have time to
read a 5 minute article and not much more, even though there are more interesting articles to
read…time is of the essence these days.

prototype in as3

To address the bullet points above, I conceptualized a cross word puzzle that was created using
Aonaware dictionary API & Newswire NYT API. Answers to the crosswords are headlines from the last 24 hrs and
clues are taken from the dictionary API. Once any crossword item is found, a link to that article is made available on mouse hover. Words are color coded for Category [i.e. business, culture, etc.] and a number is posted on the last square to tell the user how long the item will take to read. This makes for a fun way to learn words, find serendipitous articles and make fun/efficient use of time.

Newswire crossword - data viz play

Times Newswire Project

This visualization is a tag cloud of the newswire sections. The frequency of the section determines the weight in the cloud.
Parsing the sections to get the frequency was the toughest, but more rewarding part of working on this project.
I had some trouble adding urls for the tag cloud to the project, to make it more interactive. It’s something that I would want to add
in another iteration of the project.

Tag Cloud

I think of this as a widget that could be in the corner of a webpage.

NewsWire Project

The idea behind the initial design was to create a fun, interactive visualization which would encourage people to look at the news/headlines without the current restrictions of “sections.” The headlines self-organize into their sections eventually, but initially they roam the screen freely, allowing people to see connections between stories that might not end up associated with each other in the paper or on the site.

Code, images, and application

Newswire API Visualization

OK I’ve spent WAY too much time on this since class and I don’t really have a lot more to show than some interaction, so I’m calling it quits for now and here is the final project. Getting used to the New York Times API’s was fun and not too difficult, however creating visualizations in C++ is proving to be a very big challenge. I need to accomplish this for my thesis though so as painful as this was I really learned a lot and built a lot of things that I can use in the future to (hopefull) speed up the process significantly

The blog won’t let me embed vimeo video, so here are the screenshots and you can check out the video here

NYTimes TimesWire Visualization

http://parsons.justinblinder.com/datavis09/timeswire/justinblinder_timeswire.html

My visualization initially focused on the “terms” and “catagory tags” associated with each article.  After realizing that most of these terms were very specific, I instead chose to use the section that each article was a part of. I created circles for the articles and made variables for their size, color, and position, that corresponded to the section frequency and the title.  I hoping to give a basic idea of the section frequency within a certain period of time, however partially randomized positioning is still a bit chaotic.

My original design plan was to have a radial positioning for each section that slowly emanated  from the center. I used this process in my second visualization mockup, and showed the frequency of articles for each section within the last 24 hours.

Timeswire Headline Length Visualization

My idea was to pull in the headlines from the NYTimes Newswire API in order to count and visualize the total headline length and relative word lengths of each worth in the individual headlines. I ran into the technical limitation of needing more hours than were available to wrap my head around and make sense of the code that would enable me to visualize my idea. I have experience in using Processing, but it has become apparent that I need to devote more of my free time to becoming more familiar with the language and/or look into developing with an alternate language.

The applet & code are linked below. A look at the commented code will reveal a number of setbacks that I encountered on this project and I hope to address those technical back-end issues prior to launching into the upcoming midterm assignment. Applet at http://a.parsons.edu/~linc184/workaround/hw_applet/

[Week 5] TimesWire Visualization

Sorry for the delays. After some consternation about what to do with the TimesWire API, I determined my best approach would be to construct a wrapper and built out some basic tools for my use with it. As I went about this process, one thing that I kept coming back to was the ‘Section’ field for each article. As I worked throughout the night, I saw that over time, different sections were dominating the last 20 responses I was pulling (this is before I found out in class that we could pull results over a longer period of time). My prototype and mockup both deal with the of being able to track which section of the paper was currently submitting the most articles, as a way to get a sense of the ebb and flow of the production schedules of each section. I thought this would provide an interesting look at a hidden side of The Times, and I may pursue it further just to see what the actual results are like. My second idea which I unfortunately could not find a meaningful way to produce was the idea of an article-generated game as a way to combine the growing popularity of casual (especially mobile) games and a desire to have them be educational.

Here’s a screenshot and link to my SWF that returns back The Times section with the highest frequency of articles within the last 20:

[ SWF ]

Here’s a screenshot link to a PDF I made of the mockup for a proposed project that would include this:

[ Mockup (PDF) ]

Timeswire Data Viz

Data viz using the New York Times Newswire API (swf)

The Newswire API is returning the last 20 updates to the Times website. My data viz is analyzing that data based on section & time submitted. Each update is signified by the small light blue boxes. Its value along the y axis signifies what category it falls into (based on what section heading it’s on the same line as) and its x axis value signifies the time when it was submitted (in relation to the earliest and most recent updates).

Data viz mockup using same data

This mockup is a play on TalkLikeWarrenEllis.com, which randomly generates phrases based on his tweets (example: “Good day, sleek piranha of impending doom.”) albeit much less hilarious. The idea is that it would take headlines from the TimesWire and split them up around punctuation marks and randomly generate sentences based on those pieces.

NYTimes Newswire API

The circular rings are rotated around a center point based on the time the news piece was posted. The size of the ring is based on the number of characters in the headline and different colors are used for each section (for purely aesthetic reasons). The dense area in the middle indicates that a majority of the headlines are around the same characters in length. Click on the image to view the visualization.

Here the length of the characters are represented as a equalizer-like histogram. Moving the mouse over the bars reveals the headline and generates/plays a pulse wave. The frequency is also based on the number of characters in each headline – low for shorter and high for longer headlines.

The mockup below is intended to be a generative tetris-like game. The pieces are generated based the headline that is displayed along with the piece. Each section is color coded and has a piece assigned to it. Higher points can be scored by attaching the pieces to headlines that are related based on terms or people mentioned.

Post on my blog.

Newswire API

Read more about the post on my blog.