New York Times data visualization

Data Visualization | 2014

1. SHOWCASE

I created data visualization which represents top 100 the most viewed and shared New York Times articles using New York Times' the most popular api.  While placing both top viewed rank and shared rank on the opposite sides, connected both of the articles based on their categories so that I can compared reader's behaviors. Since I'm really interested in analyzing content consumption, I wanted to find out the difference in reader's behavior of viewing articles and sharing articles according to their traits.

Phase 1. Several attempts to make 'data visualization'

- Visualizing most shared articles top 20 listing by titles

>>  Even though the user interface is easy to check out the popular articles, it is more like website, it needs to be more visualized.

-Visualizing images from most popular articles

I looked more carefully at the NYTimes api and realized that it is possible to pull up images from the articles and I decided to use images for data visualization. It took at least for 2 days to only figure it out how to pull up images from articles. I had a great chance to learn about several functions I've never used before such as try/catch statement during this time. 

At first, I decided to display top 20 articles' image as thumbnails and if users click the area, it goes to the next window that arranges images in order of the ranking. 

While I've been trying several thing, I wondered what it could be if I display images as individual character from each title. I applied the String chapter example from Learning Processing. However, it didn't work as what I expected. I couldn't figure out the reason but it didn't represent the images as it is. 

On top of this, since I was not sure about the concept and exact meaning of doing what I planned, I kept thinking other ways to visualize data. 

Phase 2. sketching and developing

Analyzing popular sections by comparing between most viewed and most shared articles

I was still stuck with using images and I couldn't give up using it. I decided to start from scratch and identify a concept .

1. What I'm interested in : User content consumption / Content curation

2. What I chose : Using NY Times most popular API which includes most emailed/shared/viewed

3. What the api provides : Ranking, Articles, Images, Section info about each article and etc. 

4. What I had done : Pulling up the titles and images from popular articles

4. What I can represent : I came up with the idea that  it could be very helpful to curate content if I know what categories are popular to users. Even though the New York Times' readers have exceptional character, I decided to analyze it starting from New York Times and extend it globally.

3. final result