The context
Thinking about text visualization, I found it interesting to create something that could visualize informations in a graphic way, using a system already known by everyone: the analogue clock, which we all know and use in everyday life.
Thinking about the potential of giving information in relationship to time, and the potential of the web as a holder of this information, I thought of combining these two aspects to use the clock to display of this information.
The information
I found it interesting to work with news items.
There are so many newspapers and others source of information we can read to update ourselves on what happens in the world, or maybe our city. But we can't easily know when these news items will come up, and discover their behaviour.
There are many different ways to publish news items of different categories: the number of items published, their size, the time dedicated to a topic during the day or during the week, if we are interested in sports news for instance.
It could also be interesting to know how a newspaper talks about a specific topic (in order to quantify the quality of news published) in comparison with another newspaper.
The project
NewsClock is a news visualizer. For each topic you can see the time when the news item appears. The data are taken reading different Rss feeds on the web, each related to a specific topic. It shows the last 10 items on each topic.
NewsClock scans the Rss feeds of a specific online newspaper in order to be always updated on the last 10 news items published. It scans different feeds, one for each category I decided to show.
Then, for each item it draws an arc positioned at the exact time when that item appeared, using the common clock convention. For each category there is a circle, so you can easily know about the category you're interested in.
AM and PM are each shown in a separate 12-hour, the one we're used to. The colour of the arcs shows the category, and the density of the colour tells you when an item is longer than another.
