Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Deconstructing BBC Site Design

The BBC website is held in extremely high regard by web designers. Having briefly explored the grid and golden ratio as design principles, I'm interested in deconstructing the BBC site to see what I can learn from it.

The first thing I observed is that the image ratios do not hold to the golden ratio. The main story image is 304 wide and 171 high, a ratio of 1.78.

This ratio is repeated for the two smaller image sizes associated with sub stories in the main area and also those in the right column.

 

Other (non-news) areas of the site have a couple of other sizes. The large lead image on the sports area maintains the ratio at 464 x 261.

But the smaller thumbnail for video elements on the right column of the sports section has a ratio consistent with the video player (66 x 49, a ratio of 1.35).

The site has two main columns. The primary column has a width of 640px and is contains two sub-columns of 320px each.

The right hand column is slightly wider than these sub-columns coming it at around 340px, suggesting a fine grained grid metric of 20px.

The navigational tabs at the top of the page, which expand out to two rows, do not align with the columnar structure and are designed to fit the width of the text in the tab control rather than some standard tab width.

BBC Real Time News Attention

I'm very late to this, but I'm posting it anyway. The BBC has a nice real time monitor for where people are spending their attention on their site/with their news.

Interactive Graphic Depicting Baghdad Deaths

The Beeb has another nice interactive graphic which allows you to explore the timeline of fatal events in Baghdad. You can overlay regional ethnic information and scroll through a timeline of events.

Positive and Negative National Influence

Briefly, I just spotted this graphic on the BBC site. I'd love to look at creating the same sort of chart from mining references in social media.

BBC Infographics on Iraq

Briefly, the Beeb has some new data presented on the Iraqi conflict.

BBC: Brits Abroad

The Beeb has a nice little site with data about British expats.

BBC Generation Next and Open Data

The Beeb has a nice graphic illustrating their article on Generation Next. Below you can see a map coloured to indicate the percentage of people per capita under 18 years of age. Readers of this blog will know that I'm not a fan of this type of cylindrical projection. I'd offer an alternative, but I don't have access to the data that the BBC used to generate the map. The article does credit the United Nations as being the source, but how about a direct link to the data?

As for the data - my reaction is that this distribution probably has an inverted relationship with that of percentage of population with access to the internet.

Latest Backstage Project: BBC Touch

Chris Riley has posted an interesting site to the backstage mailing list: BBC Touch. What the site does is compare the news stories on the front page (which are described as the stories the beeb 'wants' us to read) and compares these with the most popular (most read) stories based on the most read stories RSS feed (this is described as the stories 'we' want to read). On top of this, some key term extraction is done via the Yahoo term extraction API.

The site is definitely fun, however, one needs to have a bit more perspective as to the function of the BBC and its relationship to other news media services. Research by Ethan Zuckerman demonstrated that the global coverage of the BBC news (that is to say, the distribution of countries in articles published by the BBC) is quite different from that for other (US based) media. Note that currently, Ethan is not supporting his Global Attention Profile research page, so you may have to dig a little to get the details. Secondly, one has to be careful in interpreting popularity. The BBC has a clear obligation to  provide informative and broad coverage to the nation (and the world). Guiding news via popularity is in part an admission of news-as-entertainment which is a very slippery slope. Remember the BBC is not a commercial enterprise.

One could almost look at this site as indicating how in touch readers are :-)

Talk Back Monitoring - Watch Your Mouth

I've written before about the BBC's progressive project backstage which is developing a community around feed's provided by the BBC. Something that just came up from the associated mailing list is a site called News Sniffer. It does a number of interesting feed related things perhaps the most interesting thing there is called Watch Your Mouth.

Like a number of media sites, the BBC has a format for providing feedback and comments on articles - a form of social media often referred to as chatback or talkback. Watch Your Mouth monitors these comments and spots when they are editorially removed. It then ranks the news articles by the count of removed comments.

The site looks like fun. The site could be improved by including both the total number of comments as well as the percentage removed alongside the basic count of the number of removed comments.

Note that the BBC's talkback system (at least as I have used it) has always been editorially controlled, though I wasn't aware of this practice of removing already published comments.

News Sniffer also has a neat Revisonista tab which lists news articles that have been revised and republished. It would be great here to track the changes that have been made...

The Digital Windfall

I heard a very interesting story this past week at the party I was attending over in the UK. The BBC will switch over to full digital broadcast for TV and radio sometime around 2014. When that happens, the spectrum currently being used will be available for recycling - and the treasury expects to get 20 billion pounds out of it. Sweet.

However, there is a slight problem. This was all projected and locked in before high definition was on the radar. Because high definition requires more bandwidth, if things went as currently planned but with HD the requirements on spectrum would be different, effectively eating in to the 20 billion. As the 20 billion is locked in to future spending, the government is reluctant to shift.

The solution is to either offer less post switch over, hope that new compression technology will pick up the slack before 2014 or to look to the internet (IPTV?) for a solution. The BBC has always been very progressive and creative in their use of the internet (releasing archives, engaging users and developers with projects like The Time When and Backstage). It will be interesting to see how they cope with this one.

The story was interesting to me as it underlined how near horizons are for the space that I'm involved in (web 2.0, etc.) but how far horizons are for infrastructure and other enabling systems which cannot be manifested purely out of a market economy.