by Alberto Moro
Thinking about text visualization, I found interesting to create something that could visualize informations in a graphic way, using a system already know by everyone.
This system is the analogic clock, which all know and use in everyday life.
Thinking about the potentiality of give informations in relationship to the time, and the potentiality of the web as a an holder of these informations, I thought to carry these two aspetcs in order to use the clock as a display of these informations.
What are these informations ?
One thing I found interesting was to work with news.
There are so many newspapers and others sources of information we can read in order to be update on what happens in the world, or maybe in our city.
But we can’t easily know the timing when these news comes up, and discover their behaviour. I mean, maybe there’s different ways to publish news of different categories: the nuber of news published, their size, the time dedicated to a topic during the day or during the week, if we are interesting on sports news for istance.
Also could be interesting to know how a newspaper talk about a specific topic (in order to quantity al quality of news published) in respect to another newspaper.
From these notes I started to design NewsClock.
The project
NewsClock is a news visualizer.
For each topic you can see the time when the news goes up.
The data are taken reading differents rss feed on the web, each of those related to a specific topic. It show the last 10 news for each topic.
How it works
NewsClock scan the rss feeds of a specific online newspaper in order to be always update on the last 10 news published. It scan differents rss, one for each category I decided to show in.
Then, for each news it draw an arc positioned at the exactly time when that news comes up, using the common clock convention. For each category there are a circle, so you can easily know about the category you’re interested in.
The “am” (ante meridiem) and “pm” (post meridiem) are showing in a different way, using for each of those the 12h clock, the one we’re used.
The color of the arcs is in relationship with the category, and the power of the color tells you when a news is longer than another.
The future
NewsClock is at the first version. I’d like to go on with this project to allow the user to choose two different newspaper and compare in.
Download
Here you can download the program I wrote (1.2mb). Take a look!
(Put the whole folder in your Processing Sketchbook file; open Processing and choose newsClock from the Sketch menu. You need a connection to the internet to run the program because it depends on live RSS feeds.)