IDM IGERT Summer '05: Analysis of News Flow in the US

The objective of this project is to analyze the geographical and temporal movement of information, specifically headline news stories in major US newspapers, from a central point of origin (the newspaper headquarters) to dissemination
among the papers’ readership, and relate this movement with the location of the news events in space and time. The main questions we wish to ask are:

• Is news reported differently around the United States; who has access to which news stories and when?
• How can semantic meaning and geography be related through visualization?
• Does news spread like a disease; can it be modeled?

Research supported by the NSF IGERT Program in Interactive Digital Multimedia
at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Award #DGE-0221713)