Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The News Co-occurrence 3D Globe


The News Co-occurrence Globe is an interactive map showing which countries are mentioned together in worldwide news coverage. The map hopes to provide an insight into how the global press groups together countries around the world.

To create the map the GDELT Project analyzed newspapers around the world in 65 different languages. When a country was mentioned in an article every other country mentioned in the article was noted in order to create a co-occurrence score showing which countries are linked together in news stories.

If you click on a country on the 3d globe you can view all the other countries around the world that have appeared in news articles together with the selected country. You can also view a graph showing the percentage change of co-occurrences for the selected country over the length of the GDELT Project study.

I'd really like to be able to view the data in a table format as well. The interactive globe doesn't seem to show the number of co-occurrences between any two countries. A data table would be able to show the number of news articles in which two countries were both mentioned.

For example, on the globe the USA is shown to have co-occurrences with Antarctica and Syria. However there doesn't seem to be any weighting to show how often the USA was mentioned in news articles with Syria and Antarctica. I'm fairly certain that there must have been far more news articles concerning the US and Syria than about the USA and Antarctica. However there appears to be no way of determining the number of co-occurrences between different countries on the map.

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