Your Corner of the News Ecosystem

Your Corner of the News Ecosystem

In today's divisive political climate, Americans are becoming increasingly aware of their consumption of political news. Serious questions have arise about how we share, read, and propagate news. While user behavior can be studied and evaluated, understanding relationships between sources of news content and how they hyperlink to one another is a fundamental in understanding the structure of a larger news ecosystem.

The Data

The data driving this visualization comes from the GDELT Project, and consists of political news sites and the aggregate hyperlink counts between sites. This version of the visualization uses a small, manually curated subset of this massive dataset.

The Visualization

This exploratory visualization leverages a D3 force-directed layout simulation to render an interactive network graph, parameters of which can be modified by the sliders on the right.

Nodes represent news websites and are sized according to the sites' total hyperlink counts. The nodes can also be hovered over and dragged around to better reveal the structure of graph.

Links represent aggregate counts of hyperlinks between websites and will highlight when hovering over an adjacent node.

Clicking on a node will color nodes in the graph based on network distance between the selected node and all other nodes in the network using Dijkstra's algorithm. Colors can be cleared by clicking Reset Graph on the right.

Gravitational forces affecting node positioning can also be applied applied to further reveal groupings within the graph and can even be used to accentuate Dijkstra graph distance.

Reddit Stories display current popular stories on the Reddit community forums for the most recently moused-over domain, when enabled.

Potential Futures

Perhaps what is most exciting about this proof-of-concept visualization is the potential for further iterations, focusing on non-english speaking sites, including more data points, more gravity fields, incorporating user data from social media APIs, and so much more!