Monday, February 06, 2017

Putting News on the Map


Unfiltered.news is an interesting way to explore what news stories are currently being reported in countries around the world. At the heart of Unfiltered.news is an interactive cartogram visualizing the top news stories being reported in each country.

The map shows the top 100 news stories from Google News for each country on the map. If you select a country's circle on the map the top news stories from the country will load in the map sidebar and the topics will appear in the circle.

The size of the words indicate the number of times the topic has been mentioned in the news. If you select a topic from the map the news stories relating to that topic will then appear in the map sidebar. A timeline will also appear which allows you to explore the news trends for that topic over time.


Heatmap News also uses the Google News API. As the name suggests Heatmap News provides a visual heat map of locations around the world which are currently in the news.

The heatmap overlay provides a visual guide as to where news stories are currently breaking around the world. You can also click on countries on the map to read the latest news stories from that country listed on Google News. Perhaps the most useful feature in Heatmap News is the 'Date' filter. This allows you to search for news stories by date as well as location. This can be useful if you want to research which news stories were happening at different locations on specific dates.


If you don't like your news filtered by Google then you can always go direct to the websites of newspapers around the world. Newspaper Map is an interactive map which provides links to thousands of daily newspapers across the globe.

Individual newspapers are located on the map using colored map markers. The colors of the markers indicate the language that the paper is published in. If you click on the markers you can find a link to the newspaper's website and a link to read the paper via Google Translate.


The US News Map from Georgia Tech allows you to search for keywords in historical American newspapers and then view the results across space and time. The map searches for words in the Library of Congress' database of historical newspapers which includes American newspapers from 1836 to 1922 (a database of more than 10 million newspaper pages).

The application is an amazing resource for visualizing the frequency that words or names appeared in American newspapers over this period. The map helps visualize where newspapers were writing about any given subject and how interest in that subject might have changed over time.

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