Diamonds in the rough: Social media visual analytics for journalistic inquiry

Nicholas Diakopoulos*, Mor Naaman, Funda Kivran-Swaine

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

191 Scopus citations

Abstract

Journalists increasingly turn to social media sources such as Facebook or Twitter to support their coverage of various news events. For large-scale events such as televised debates and speeches, the amount of content on social media can easily become overwhelming, yet still contain information that may aid and augment reporting via individual content items as well as via aggregate information from the crowd's response. In this work we present a visual analytic tool, Vox Civitas, designed to help journalists and media professionals extract news value from large-scale aggregations of social media content around broadcast events. We discuss the design of the tool, present the text analysis techniques used to enable the presentation, and provide details on the visual and interaction design. We provide an exploratory evaluation based on a user study in which journalists interacted with the system to explore and report on a dataset of over one hundred thousand twitter messages collected during the U.S. State of the Union presidential address in 2010.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationVAST 10 - IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology 2010, Proceedings
Pages115-122
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event1st IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, VAST 10 - Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Duration: Oct 24 2010Oct 29 2010

Publication series

NameVAST 10 - IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology 2010, Proceedings

Other

Other1st IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, VAST 10
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City, UT
Period10/24/1010/29/10

Keywords

  • Computational journalism
  • Computer assisted reporting
  • H.5.2 information interfaces and presentation: user interfaces
  • Sensemaking
  • Social media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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