serial consign

In working on my thesis, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about visualizing the production of news. There are a lot of interesting models out there which schematize this process through geography, language, intertextuality, and magnitude of coverage. Two particular models have resonated with me and I keep coming back to them as precedents.

The first (pictured above) is buzztracker, which utilizes the mercator map as a means of organization. The press is monitored for mention of cities and geographic regions and the places mentioned most frequently register as hotspots. This model is a lot like a weather or traffic report (see Joshua Davis's proposed Google News redesign) where conditions fluctuate over time.

The second model is the Stamen Design authored Swarm, which is part of their suite of visualizations prepared for Digg. What is so interesting about swarm, is that it neuters the geographic context of news events and charts how readers respond to them, and what other material these readers are bookmarking. It is easy to write this dynamism off as resulting from the fundamental difference between conventional media consumption and participatory social bookmarking but the visualization is tracking how people interact with the news, not what or where the news is.