NYT Times Wire widget for Firefox

Recently, in the advanced CC lab, we experimented with Mozilla JetPack, which is simple scripts for Firefox widgets.

With JetPack, I made Times Wire headline visualizer with Times Wire API.
You can see flowing headlines on the status bar of Firefox and you can click the title to open the article page into new tab of Firefox.

http://www.cre8ive.kr/blog/?p=1539

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

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/

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.

Times Wire

This visualization was intended to provide the feeling of flipping newspaper, to make people more comfortable with screen. I located section data on the top of the paper so that user can find favorite section first, then user can grasp the headline. I tried to design this visualization can be used with touch screen display, in home information system.
Made with Flash AS3.0, Papervision 3D

http://www.cre8ive.kr/DataViz/TimesWire.html

This visualization utilizes colors to categorize the sections, and articles are stacked up chronologically. I also tried to use saturation to visualize the time of the article however, it makes somewhat ambiguous color scheme for section categorization.