Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

A SHARI story covering the biggest news story of October 25, 2010 , involving revelations about Facebook. Follow @StormyArchives on Twitter for daily updates on yesterday's biggest news story. SHARI is back. Each day, the Dark and Stormy Archives Project will apply the SHARI process to gather the news articles for the previous day's top stories and present them as a social media story, as seen above. Each card in the story links to a memento of a news article in a web archive. Each story will be shared via the @StormyArchives social media account. SHARI depends on Dr. Alexander Nwala's  StoryGraph service. We thank the Internet Archive for helping us restore StoryGraph, thus making SHARI possible once again. SHARI uses StoryGraph and the DSA Toolkit to apply all of the storytelling processes from the five-process storytelling model. SHARI satisfies all of the processes from our five-process storytelling model. As shown above, SHARI uses StoryGraph to select exemplar...

Fig. 1: Fig. 1 (Click on image to expand): Story Attention Dynamics chart illustrating the life-cycle of two top news stories from May 18, 2018 -- May 19, 2018. Each line (red or blue) represents a top news story. The x-axis represents time while the y-axis represents the average degree of Connected Components (representation of story). Within our window of observation, the  Santa Fe High School Shooting   story received peak attention on Friday May 18, 2018 at 4:40PM, this attention waned with the lowest point coinciding with the rise of a new story, the  Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle . News stories are born expected or unexpected, big or small, compete for attention with sibling stories or enjoy the spotlight alone, live short or long lives, and exit through death or hibernation.  Since August 2017, every 10-minutes, StoryGraph has been quantifying the attention given to news stories. In the past three years, we have seen threats of war , hurrica...

One year ago, I was eagerly anticipating a trip to Boston in mid-March to attend the Computation + Journalism (C+J) Symposium 2020 hosted by Northeastern University.  Our PhD student Alexander Nwala would be presenting a poster on his Storygraph work, and I was especially looking forward to the keynote addresses, in particular one from Amanda Cox, whose work I've highlighted in my Information Visualization courses for several years. Unfortunately, this was the first of several conferences for me to be impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.  So, I was thrilled that the organizers decided to revive the 2020 program as a virtual symposium this year ( program and schedule ). Videos are promised, and I'll update this post when that's available.  [5/7/21: Recordings of the keynote speakers and panels are now available!] Some statistics from Computation+Journalism 2021 - A total of 879 people attended at least some part of the day, with a maximum of 415 people at any one tim...

Fig. 1 (Click image to expand) 366 dots in 2020 - Top news stories for 366 days in 2020. Each dot represents the average degree of the Giant Connected Component (GCC) with the largest average degree across all the 144 story graphs for a given day. The x-axis represents time, the y-axis represents the average degree of the GCC. The annotations (and legend) represented by colored dots were assigned semi-automatically . I join the chorus to say 2020 was a year like no other, and shaped by three historic events: the Coronavirus pandemic , the protests surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and the US Presidential elections . According to StoryGraph , in 2018, the top news story was the Kavanaugh hearings . In 2019, it was the Mueller Report . Similar to 2018 and 2019 , we analyzed all news stories collected by StoryGraph at 10-minute intervals every day in 2020, to identify the top news stories of 2020. Recall how we identify top news stories , explained briefly in 365 dots in 201...