Reading News with Maps by Exploiting Spatial Synonyms

Published in the October 2014 issue of Communications of the ACM.

Summary

NewsStand is a system that reads news articles, derives the physical locations those articles reference, and clusters them on a browsable map. My area of responsibility on NewsStand was the UI/UX of the web interface.

Figure 1. Shows NewsStand Map Mode: a visualization of the globe populated with multi-color icons indicating local news stories

Figure 1. NewsStand Map Mode: (a) Example screenshot for “What is happening at location X on March 26, 2014?”; (b) representative headline in Moscow for the Obama/Putin relationship topic; and (c) representative headlines for topics associated with Moscow.