Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Fig. 1: Fig. 1 (Click on image to expand): Story Attention Dynamics chart illustrating the life-cycle of two top news stories from May 18, 2018 -- May 19, 2018. Each line (red or blue) represents a top news story. The x-axis represents time while the y-axis represents the average degree of Connected Components (representation of story). Within our window of observation, the  Santa Fe High School Shooting   story received peak attention on Friday May 18, 2018 at 4:40PM, this attention waned with the lowest point coinciding with the rise of a new story, the  Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle . News stories are born expected or unexpected, big or small, compete for attention with sibling stories or enjoy the spotlight alone, live short or long lives, and exit through death or hibernation.  Since August 2017, every 10-minutes, StoryGraph has been quantifying the attention given to news stories. In the past three years, we have seen threats of war , hurrica...

Fig. 1 (Click image to expand) 366 dots in 2020 - Top news stories for 366 days in 2020. Each dot represents the average degree of the Giant Connected Component (GCC) with the largest average degree across all the 144 story graphs for a given day. The x-axis represents time, the y-axis represents the average degree of the GCC. The annotations (and legend) represented by colored dots were assigned semi-automatically . I join the chorus to say 2020 was a year like no other, and shaped by three historic events: the Coronavirus pandemic , the protests surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and the US Presidential elections . According to StoryGraph , in 2018, the top news story was the Kavanaugh hearings . In 2019, it was the Mueller Report . Similar to 2018 and 2019 , we analyzed all news stories collected by StoryGraph at 10-minute intervals every day in 2020, to identify the top news stories of 2020. Recall how we identify top news stories , explained briefly in 365 dots in 201...

Figure 1 (click figure to enlarge): Illustration of the level of attention given to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) story by news organization measured with StoryGraph's longitudinal data. The y-axis represents the average degree or attention score of the Connected Components (CC) which represents stories about the DNC story and other stories (e.g., Mail voting - green diamond) that occurred between August 17 and August 21, 2020 (x-axis). The four annotated peaks --- with average degree median 11.88 --- of the DNC story corresponds with discussions surrounding Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden. The subscripts represent the document frequencies of the bigram annotations. For example ," Michelle Obama " occurred 31 times in the text of the CC documents. The Democratic Party held the Democratic National Convention (DNC) from August 17, 2020 to August 20, 2020. The following week, from August 24 to August 27, the Republican Party held the Repub...

Fig. 1: Three connected components from three different StoryGraphs, representing three different news stories. The first connected component represents the news story about North Korea considering firing missiles at Guam , the second, the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan , and the third, AG William Barr's release of his summary of the Mueller Report . A lot has happened in three years. We've seen threats of war , hurricanes Harvey / Irma / Maria , upsets in  elections ,  a royal wedding , an impeachment , a pandemic , etc. For all these stories and many more, for three years, every 10-minutes, StoryGraph has been reading the news, generating news similarity graphs, and quantifying the level of attention news stories receive. August 8, 2020 marked the third year since StoryGraph went live. In this blogpost, I will take a retrospective look at the studies StoryGraph has enabled and a promise multiple services and studies for the future. StoryGraph's Past: studies a...

Click to expand: Overview of StoryGraph illustrating the process of generating a news similarity graph is four primary steps. The four steps are explained in the StoryGraph Tech Report We never did give StoryGraph  a proper introduction. Over three years, I have tweeted, created a Twitter account ( @storygraphbot ) for StoryGraph, and published two blogposts that utilized the StoryGraph service to determine the top news stories of 2018 and 2019 . But I never really introduced and motivated the need for StoryGraph. I hoped that the  Computation + Journalism Symposium  would provide the opportunity for giving StoryGraph a proper introduction, but the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted it. To commemorate #ElectionDay , Same domain story linking results for October 2018 (for @BreitbartNews @FoxNews @CNN @HuffPost ) shows stories news media focused on 1 month before the elections. pic.twitter.com/Xw196Y66Mi — StoryGraph (@storygraphbot) November 6, 2018 The...