News Globe

Abstract

The quantity of online news articles available nowadays is rapidly increasing. When exploring articles on online news portals, navigation is mostly limited to the most recent articles. The spatial context and the history of topics are not immediately accessible. To improve the accessibility of large news datasets, visualization of the articles and attached metadata can be a helpful tool. In order to support readers and journalists in the exploration or research of articles in large datasets, we developed an interactive 3D globe visualization with a focus on geospatial news data. For the definition and implementation of the method, we worked with a dataset of around 45’000 articles from a local online news portal.

In particular, we study metadata visualization of news articles, which includes spatial, temporal, and topic-specific features. Using agglomerative hierarchical clustering, we represent the referenced locations of news articles on a globe with different levels of detail. We employ two interaction schemes for navigating the viewpoint on the visualization, including support for Augmented Reality on mobile devices. Our method features search functionality and interactive filtering over different types of metadata to allow users to focus on a desired subset of articles. Based on this framework, we explore additional modules for jointly exploring the spatial and temporal domain of the dataset and incorporating live news into the visualization.