Comment by bmusto19 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmusto19 | Hacker News Reader

Hi there! My friend and I are working on a website called The Newsphere and we’re looking for others who share our interest in understanding current events to help us beta test our platform. The Newsphere acts as a virtual map of world news, enabling users to see the news as the result of a complex web of relationships between people, places, organizations, and countries. You can watch our intro video on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwgat54KXg&t=3s and signup for the beta here: https://newsphere.org or keep reading to learn more about the Newsphere.

Basically, our model analyzes thousands of news articles every day, and uses natural language processing to extract the different entities in them, as well as identifying relationships between them. Over time we construct narratives, which the user can see illustrated on a graphical timeline. The goal here is to give context to current events, enabling users to view recent developments in light of past patterns of behavior.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can email us directly at questions@newsphere.org and we’ll be happy to get back to you. Again, you can sign up for our beta here: https://newsphere.org

Thanks again!

Interesting! I'd love to watch the video on the front page, but it won't work on Safari.

Or Chrome on iOS.

That's also Safari

The video doesn't load either on Firefox / Linux. There is not error message in the console.

Playback works correctly on Chromium / Linux .

We're working on fixing the video on our site, if you'd like you can watch it on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwgat54KXg&t=3s

We've updated the frontpage so that the video plays from youtube now, let us know if you guys keep running into issues watching it!

Very interesting. I signed up for the beta.

I really like your timeline concept. I'd almost maybe double down on that, and move away from the graph model (where the geometric layout is not really grounded to an easily accessible mental model). I'm not sure what the ideal looks like, but my hunch is the timeline view might be at the center of it.

Similar opinion here. I had a lot of trouble grasping the idea until a minute into the video where you show the timeline aspect. I'd try to explore some other UI layouts. There's something a bit off in making a user click the graph, move eyes down to the timeline, then back up to the article.

(thinking aloud, Perhaps de-emphasize the graph (make it smaller?) and make the timeline vertical / leftish-center? then give the article more room for reading. Or possibly put graph&timeline at top then the article below so the article can be viewed in full & scrolled without any frame windowing.)

I really like the graph model. I don't necessarily prefer it over the timeline model, but in general people learn/grasp concepts and topics differently. For me personally, it helps to visualize in multiple ways and even just seeing the connection between nodes is incredibly helpful. I think more ways to visualize is better than just picking one. Not disagreeing though it may be best for the timeline to be the center of it.

Thank you for the feedback! We're also really liking the timeline aspect of the stie, but we still think there's ways to incorporate at least some sort of graph model as well. This might be something we'd A/B test

Perhaps more or a PCA graph would work, where there is a clear grounding of the math in how you are generating it. Or perhaps a tree structure. I think showing connections is good, just think the timeline at the moment seems very promising.

Looks promising. Consider dynamic node sizing/coloration to indicate activity/trends. Looking forward to participate.

Looks really cool. This could really pave the way for something fantastic.

Thanks, we think so as well :)

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