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In a similar vein to last week’s post. Idiom.at’s new award winning Media Watch on Climate Change is an original web application that allows users to view current articles on climate change from 150 Anglo-American news websites. Using two maps - one semantic, the other geographic, the application shows how much volume a subject is written about and where the article was published. The semantic map features articles as single pixels, with related articles in close proximity. The more one subject is written about, the more pixels congregate in that area. The map then superimposes a topographic map with higher elevations signifying more debated topics. When taken in all together, the map provides an eye-catching, if at first confusing, alternative to stark graphs and charts.
The vision of a Geospatial Web promotes the convergence of geographic information, Internet technology and social change. Taking a step towards this vision, the Media Watch on Climate Change uses automated content analysis to extract geospatial context and build a geotagged knowledge base.
The web application was featured at the International Symposium on Digital Earth at University of California, Berkely.
This is another interesting example of repurposing existing metaphors (in this case quasi topographic map) as information display. It is exciting but we also see some of the dangers of this practice. It takes a little bit before one actually realizes that the semantic map is, in fact, only semantic. Positioned as it is by a traditional map, and using the standard google map interface, it is hard to realize at first that it doesn’t describe some real geographic space.
