Description

The purpose of this visualization is to show a social Richter Scale. How is a topic such as “earthquake”, used in this example, portrayed by both traditional media and social media? I used the NYT’s Article Search API to represent what traditional media outlets are saying and the Twitter API to represent what “the people”, or social media, are saying.

I faced many challenges in creating this project. First, the limitations of an external API are many. The number of chunks of data you can pull at a time is extremely small, especially when you are pulling from multiple sources within one program. I found that I had to limit my pulls to 10 each from NYT and Twitter in order not to crash my program.

Another challenge was getting the output value to look the way I wanted it to. From unpredictable string size to printing number values instead of just strings to printing meaningful output, I really struggled to make this project tell the story I wanted it to. One iteration I played around with was having the values print like a news ticker. While this help deal with the number of instances the program pulled from each API at once, it didn’t give a bigger picture of how the two media outlets were portraying the same type of story.

I ultimately ended up printing the output onto the screen the way a Richter Scale prints out seismographic data. I added a shaking element to the text to give the illusion of movement in order to represent figurative movement of a group. Overall I like the look and feel of the piece; I kept it simple and tried to reflect the simplicity of a Richter Scale.

Code

Download full source here.