Towards a Functional Interface for Temporal Navigation of News Archives

News producers in the digital era have adopted web standards like XML for representing news stories in datastores. News stories are very time-sensitive information. When this information is archived over time, it could be analyzed to elicit trends and gauge the level of interest in particular topics. A novel way of visualizing this data would make such large datasets more approachable for the general public, and thus make it possible for publishers to extract additional value out of the available news stories. A user interface that helps the user navigate through the large document cor- pus would improve users’ perception of the value of the news content, and ensure continued consumption of this content. There were two aspects to building the right user interface - the usability of the interface itself, and the appropriateness of the vi- sual metaphor used to visualize the data. This thesis adopts an iterative approach to building the most usable interface to achieve this goal. Starting with an initial design based on study of the system and literature in the ?eld, design iterations were carried out, with a usability testing phase at the end of each iteration. The resulting interface provides a simple way to navigate news article archives in terms of concepts like peo- ple, places and organizations. It also allows users to visualize trends in news coverage for a particular concept over time.

Subject

news archives
data visualization
user interfaces
web usability
iterative development

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Student theses

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master thesis

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