Events as news drivers

This visualization serves 3 purpose:

• Demonstrate the use of a dynamic SIMILE timeplot to display the information.
• The possible effect / impact of news events on the news and the reaction thereof by different types of news sources.
• Example of cyclical impact of a one-time event on the news

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Explaining the plot.

The plot compares the number of news stories published by Professional news providers in the US for the search term terrorism over the period Jan 2001 to Jan 2003 as compared to amateur news sources with the same parameters.

The events relating to terrorism have also been plotted (red depicting terrorist activity in the US, where as green is anywhere else).

The mouse-overs can selectively be turned off to study the numbers if they are too close and begin to overlap. (using the check boxes below the time-plot)

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Grouping of news sources can be done. In this case to study the differences between professional news providers and amateur bloggers. These different types of news sources would respond to different news event in a different manner. (Such grouping, to an extent also helps answer the very first question of who is the influencer).

Inevitably news is about events / happenings; this being the very nature of the beast. The events can be sub-divided into two categories:

1. Scheduled Events
2. Unscheduled Events

The impact of the different types of events on the different news sources can be studied (and easily visualized). It would interesting to see how the intensity and the proximity of the event influences its coverage.

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Possible Extensions

*Note: The data has been extracted from wikipedia using Google spreadsheet's importHTML method. All additional processing was done in Google Spreadsheets. Some events may not have been parsed and were not manually added to reflect the state of the art in Automation.