Abstract
News media play an important role in shaping social reality, and their multimedia narrative content, in particular, can have widespread repercussions in the public’s perception of past and present phenomena. Being able to visually track changes in media coverage over time could offer the potential for aiding social change, as well as furthering accountability in journalism. In this paper, we explore how visualizations could be used to examine differences in online media narrative patterns over time and across publications. While there are existing means of visualizing such narrative patterns over time, few address the aspect of co-occurrence of variables in media content. Comparing co-occurrences of variables chronologically can be more useful in identifying patterns and possible biases in media coverage than simply counting the individual occurrences of those variables independently. Here, we present a visualization, called time-sets, which has been designed to support temporal comparisons of such co-occurrences. We also describe an interactive prototype tool we have developed based on time-sets for analysis of multimedia news datasets, using an illustrative case study of news articles published on three online sources over several years. We then report on a user study we have conducted to evaluate the time-sets visualization, and discuss its findings.
Highlights
IntroductionIconic, visualizations designed by the likes of William Playfair, Charles Joseph Minard, and Florence Nightingale (for examples of their work see [1]) were originally created and used for raising public awareness of social, political, economic, and other such issues
Many of the, iconic, visualizations designed by the likes of William Playfair, Charles Joseph Minard, and Florence Nightingale were originally created and used for raising public awareness of social, political, economic, and other such issues
Here we review other existing media content visualization methods, more fully describe the time-sets visualization prototype we have developed along with a range of interactive tools, provide more detailed journalism-related case study examples using a larger set of time-sets visualizations, and present an evaluation of the time-sets visualization which attempts to gauge its effectiveness in supporting such journalistic tasks
Summary
Iconic, visualizations designed by the likes of William Playfair, Charles Joseph Minard, and Florence Nightingale (for examples of their work see [1]) were originally created and used for raising public awareness of social, political, economic, and other such issues. Multimedia Tools and Applications (2020) 79:919–946 and imagery in reporting news. These days, the use of various forms of visualizations and “infographics” is common in most print or online newspapers. Its applications in data journalism – investigative data-laden research meant for public consumption – could be further utilized to help bring about political and social change. How could a group of people with such dissimilar views ever discuss these issues in a constructive manner, without understanding the reasons behind such different viewpoints? The question that arises is, how could people from a fairly constrained geographical area (in this case EU), with relatively similar cultural backgrounds, hold such opposing views on an issue? Could the differences in public opinion be, to a large extent, the result of how media in different countries have covered such social or political issues? More importantly, how could a group of people with such dissimilar views ever discuss these issues in a constructive manner, without understanding the reasons behind such different viewpoints?
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