Newsmap – viewing the news in a whole new way!
Newsmap
Here’s another fascinating tool that could be used for analyzing the news in classes at the middle school or high school level. Much like Wordle, Newsmap creates a cluster cloud of news stories from Google News; the bigger the story in the day’s news, the larger its shape in the cluster cloud.
One cool feature of Newsmap is that the use can view the biggest stories by nation. This could be a fun way to analyze the day’s events from a multi-national perspective.
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
This is really neat. I actually blogged about it myself after reading about it. I think if teacher’s used this site simply as a “poster” (projecting it) for students to see every morning it could have a lot of value. Love the fact that you can aggregate based on different countries. I will certainly share with my teachers. Thanks.