This week’s assignment requested us to report on a story within a 4-hour interval. I chose to report on Occupy Harvard at Lamont Library. The method I used was to create a timeline of articles that reported on the event. For each article, a short description is available. The articles I used were taken from the Google search and Google News search of the event. I attempted to include most articles that I found and I managed to include most of them. It took me 3 hours and 15 minutes to put the information together, but most of the technical work of setting up the timeline was done before that.
You can see the final outcome below. The timeline below shows the articles that covered the Occupy Library events at Harvard. They appear in the chronological order in which they were published. Clicking on the image or the title will show you more details about the article itself. Scroll left and right to see more articles.
Occupy Harvard at Lamont Library Timeline
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I love the decision to bring a timeline into this assignment. It’s got terrific potential, and I hope it’s a tool you’ll dig into a bit further. I suspect the optimum use for the tool (not possible within a 4 hour assignment, obviously) is to combine your summaries of events with links to journalistic coverage. And, as mentioned in class, I think there’s lots of potential to build better, open timeline tools for use by journalists. Very cool.
Actually each bubble title links to the original title. I think with a nice design it would be interesting to see what would be the result of automatically updating a timeline in real time with articles that are being published. I think Google News was doing something like this at some point. I would like to be able to easily visualize the main points that are discussed around a story as it progresses through time.
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