A Parsons Design + Technology collaboration studio exploring design methods for telling compelling stories with data.

Midterm Proposal: NYTimes’ Reading Level

Posted: October 9th, 2009 | Author: Bobby | Filed under: Assignments | Comments Off
  1. Overview

    2. Told as a child that the NYTimes was more difficult to read and comprehend than other papers such as the Daily News and Newsday, I now seek to look for complexity within the NYTimes headlnes and then compare those findings against an analogous data set of headlines from more accessible newspapers to see if there is a divide between the NYTimes and it’s less respected brethren.

  2. Data

    3. My data sets will be the NYTimes Newswire API + RSS feeds from papers both Local and National, including the USAToday Headline RSS.

  3. Design Questions

    4. A major question to tackle is hoe ease of read can be effectively mined from the data. I need to pay attention to studies on reading comprehension and search for indicators of reading sample difficulty. For now, I propose to assign longer headline length and higher range of word lengths within one headline to indicate higher difficulty.

    I also need to consider mapping other data, perhaps newspaper section, time of day, or authorship in order to see if there are any other underlying relationships that can be connected to the varying reading levels across newspapers.

    Previously, I explored the effectiveness of pie charts and am still interested in their use in effective data visualization, but am also interested in taking the feedback I received and implementing some sort of stacked bar chart visualization.

  4. Precedents

    5. Dave Bowker’s project, Designing the News is a major work that deals with visualizing aspects of the Guardian newspaper in unconventional ways. In the project, Bowker produced a series of visualizations of the newspaper over the course of one week. Two of the resulting six pieces dealt directly with visualizing headlines:

    http://www.designingthenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/06_saturday_a1_72.jpg
    http://www.designingthenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/03_wednesday_a1_72.jpg

  5. Collaboration

    6. I am planning to partner with Rupa as she has similar interests in comparing the NYTimes headlines to headlines sourced from other places. So far we haven’t yet worked out how our collaboration will come together, but we’ll figure it out soon.

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