BBC news white spectrum

17 June 2008

white_spectrum.jpg
a data visualisation tool which tries to analyze the debate sparked by the BBC White season of programs which aired on BBC2. the interface shows a number of particles floating around in space. each particle represents a sentence taken from the debate & is assigned a color corresponding to the type of emotion (i.e. anger, fear, hurt, confusion, happiness & caring) word found in the sentence.

particles also have a size which reflects the intensity of the emotion expressed & a brightness which indicates the average consensus (agreement/disagreement) on the comment. comments can be spatially clustered by their attributes & particles can be filtered to show exactly what the user would like to see at any given time.

[link: bbc.co.uk & dotmaze.com & bbc.co.uk|thnkx Andrea]

also see other projects originated at BBC:
. British history timeline
. most popular news stories
. mood news headlines
. tv schedule similarity

add to delicious.gif add to digg

recent entries

tracking hurricanes online genome quilts America's Cup circling galaxy 3D isometric city maps Google Chrome infographic cartoon sound of light data sculpture Demetri Martin funny chart presentation Loren Madsen data sculptures emotionally vague survey results 2008 presidential election in the blogosphere distributions of sport world records TerraForm people-based infographic movie subway map bathroom tiling Mycrocosm personal data graph portal

extra

white_spectrum02.jpg

white_spectrum03.jpg

white_spectrum04.jpg

white_spectrum05.jpg

comments

Like other attempts to visualise "emotion" by parsing text this really runs into trouble - click through to the comments to see the analysed key terms and how often they are misrepresented. This is a great example of style over substance in a data vis, and more worryingly an example of the way the form can turn highly charged data into a pretty but meaningless cloud of dots. The prospects for using data vis in this domain are fascinating - unfortunately this is a bad example.

Agree with Mitchell. It's also kind of a knockoff of We Feel Fine.

shop

post a comment