FAQ
What am I looking at?
BuzzChurn maps identify in real time where discrete events are occurring in the world. We try to uncover events at a country level that may have been overwhelmed by more traditional, hegemonic news coverage.
Where do you get your information?
We gather hundreds of news feeds from around the world every hour. Our software then performs a keyword analysis on these feeds to detect when and where something interesting is happening.
What determines the shade that a country is colored in?
When the news coming out of a country is hotter than it has been, the country is red. When the news cools off it turns blue. The software focuses on relative intensity of news for any given country in an attempt to filter out “old news.” Our maps are more likely to show something new and different that is taking place than something that has been going on for a while.
What determines the size of a country on the Bubble Map?
While a country’s color indicates relative intensity of news, its size is a gauge of the absolute number of stories the software encountered for that country.
What is being animated?
The playback feature of the bubble map lets you see world events unfold over time. The bubble map displays six or twenty four hours worth of data from our computer model. The playback rate is user configurable via the slider in the lower left corner of the map. You can also manually drag the playback slider to a given hour’s data.
What am I seeing when I click on a country?
Clicking on a country will take you to the news for that country, for the time period you are viewing. The most recent data is shown when the playback slider is farthest right. Clicking on bubbles when the slider is in this position takes you to the most up-to-date news for that country. If the slider is sitting a few hours into the past, you will be shown news stories from a few hours into the past.
Why is _______ being indicated or not being indicated on your maps?
Our software is definitely a prototype at this point, and we are dealing with finite computational resources and information sources. It’s possible that the computer model will fail to recognize an event happening, or falsely report another. Remember that our software focuses on changes in the news patterns for each country. An ongoing war or calamity eventually saturates the computer model and it will try to find events that are new and different.
What’s the utility of something like this?
Eventually we would like to expand upon this prototype and include other real-time data in order to trace global, emerging patterns in political, economic and social systems. Our thought is that this kind of data analysis could eventually be useful for forecasting conflict and other economic and political events.