Data Visualization More Than Just a Pretty Picture

Transcription

1 Data Visualization More Than Just a Pretty Picture MAY 2014

2 DATA VISUALIZATION AN ACQUIRE MEDIA WHITEPAPER 2 Introduction Data Visualization is a hot topic generating lots of buzz at present. But data visualization is a broad term for something that takes many different forms for many different types of data. Let s discuss how NewsEdge uses visualization to enhance your current and topical news review experience. We know you are not new to data visualization it is likely used throughout your organization. Operating metrics, financials, and marketing data are often presented visually as a standard part of everyday decision making. If you look around, you will find: Chart data on customer interactions that depict customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. Analytic software displaying how visitors are engaging a corporate website, yielding insights to guide an effective redesign. Maps to show where specific activities are centered growth opportunities or changing economic conditions, for example. Graphs showing the results of company or brand marketing efforts in traditional and social media to measure the success of strategies. Pie charts to show financials related to a company or industry. But many information analysts do not yet exploit data visualization as part of their standard workflow, despite the benefits in insight and time-savings they would enjoy. Let s focus together on data visualization aimed at the corporate library and current news/ competitive analysis function, visualizations designed to enhance understanding and sharpen conclusions. NewsEdge Use Case We ve all been there: It s 8 p.m., way past C.O.B., and your manager is wondering if you have had a chance to make sense of the latest batch of news about your company s competitors. Your competitors have been up to no good of late, and wow, there are a lot of stories to plow through. You are not going to get out the office in time to get to the local watering hole or even get the express train that goes home faster than most. It ll be the local for you tonight. This is where you d expect the author of this piece to complete the narrative with an instant solution, provided, of course by his company s astoundingly compelling and robustly granular news-enabled data visualization tool. Well, you d be right, because it turns out that Acquire Media s NewsEdge is catching the express train to the data visualization nation.

3 DATA VISUALIZATION AN ACQUIRE MEDIA WHITEPAPER 3 News-Enabled Data Visualization Sentiment engines have taken off, and business intelligence dashboards are all the rage for the C-suite, but visualization for taxonomy-driven news research tools and web-page news displays is still finding its way. What a leading news integration service like NewsEdge can offer in visualization differs dramatically from what the informationanalysis pundits herald as the dawning of the age of big data-driven dashboards; we are not chasing the elusive goal of magically drawing insight from facts buried deep in corporate spreadsheets and assorted intranets. What we have done is this through Topic Diagrams and Heat Maps provide visual tools that save users from having to scroll through, and read, large collections of news articles. More important, we allow users to see the news inside the news. For example, we use our relevancy ranking in color-coded heat maps to direct users to the most relevant news. Likewise, our topic displays allow a user to quickly select from classification codes, company names and/or locations to learn if intersections and correlations exist, and then uncover the real stories behind the news. NewsEdge customers have already been enjoying the unique Venn diagram topic map for over a year now. It allows users to drill down to key topics as they discover, without plowing through dozens or hundreds of headlines, what the competition is up to. NewsEdge Refinery allows users to reveal this information as a snapshot of tagged company, industry and news codes, and the Topic Venn- Diagram allows them to visualize the search results graphically. More Than Just a Pretty Picture When we consider that information professionals are looking to measure, analyze and extract key facts from large quantities of text, visual presentations are not just cast in starring roles; they provide the very foundation for the exercise. Our goal is to deploy data visualization techniques that are news-enabled and provide valuable insight at a glance not just a pretty picture. Part of this process has involved talking to users, looking at emerging technology, and of course staying on top of the latest in algorithmic capabilities, a particular strength of ours. Anyone can create a graph showing story volume over time, but does a large new volume mean something important is happening, or are we just looking at spam and the reverberations of the media echo chamber? If you are analyzing the collection of story metadata tags To follow up on our topic mapping, NewsEdge has now added a Heat Map function. The new Heat Map indicator draws your attention to important stories by showing, at a quick glance, periods of time where high volume and high relevancy in your search overlap. In your headline viewer, you will see a

4 DATA VISUALIZATION AN ACQUIRE MEDIA WHITEPAPER 4 and their relationship to one another, it can tell you the difference between a large number of stories that mention Google in a long list of Silicon Valley tech giants and the news items that break Google s latest acquisition rumors. News Quality Matters Know Your Source Meaningful data visualization is only as good as the underlying data itself. When looking at news you first need to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fluff articles or duplicate stories can skew your statistics. Knowing your content source is important too. Is the source reliable? Is the content newsworthy and relevant to your business? Is the information timely? There are many quality journalists, bloggers and news producers, but many bad ones too, unfortunately. Some excellent business journalism can be found freely online, others only through subscriptions. Know your source. Invest in Taxonomy With a quality data set as your foundation, classifying is the next step. At NewsEdge, our proprietary ACME (Acquire Media Metadata Engine) taxonomy is the product of our 20+ years of real world experience in the news business. This taxonomy has 3 main facets: Industry, Subject and Location. Today, we categorize each story we process with relevant, meaningful tags selected from over 1,300 industries, 1,500 subjects and 70,000 geographic locations. We combine our enhanced taxonomy with the original metadata provided by the news publisher for the most accurate results, a unique approach in the industry. Next we look at the named entities included in a story, extracting and normalizing company, person, etc. references. Properly identifying the entities and, more importantly, how these entities are used in the story is critical. Is a particular news article about Google or does it just mention Google? This is an important difference. What about company name changes, mergers or acquisitions? Proper identification at the time of these corporate events, and connecting these changes to archived data, is fundamental. This requires ongoing maintenance but we are up to the task: NewsEdge uses six different database authorities to cross-reference and validate any changes. new icon located at the bottom ( ). A click on this icon will produce a Heat Map for your results set. This visual identifies volume AND relevancy, and you can see it. About Acquire Media Acquire Media is the industry leader in low-latency news categorization, named-entity extraction, format standardization, filtering, alerting, realtime search, delivery, and custom APIs. We are committed to deploying solutions best suited to the unique needs of our clients. Our knowledge and experience is vast, our employees are recognized experts in their fields, and our technical sophistication is well-known, as is our responsive customer-support. Our Editorial Team boasts a group of highly trained individuals with backgrounds in journalism, reporting, news database design, and taxonomic architecture. The majority of the team holds Masters of Library Sciences degrees while others hold advanced degrees in computer science. With a minimum of 15 years each of handson experience, this team hails from such organizations as Dow Jones, Thomson-Reuters, Screaming Media/

5 DATA VISUALIZATION AN ACQUIRE MEDIA WHITEPAPER 5 The News Inside the News With a clean and properly classified news-article data set, newsenabled data visualization can begin, and can yield important, properly grounded conclusions. Using our earlier example, story volume can be quite interesting. As part of our statistical analysis, we know that Google has a predictable story volume over time. So when there is an unusual spike in story volume for a given time period, something newsworthy might be happening. A look at the metadata also shows a large overlap with drone creator, Titan Aerospace, and the subject code for acquisitions. Now this is newsworthy and the NewsEdge Topic Venn Diagram just told you in one glance. Conclusion With quality data and the right analytics, you can create powerful news-enabled data visualization. However, how that data is presented can vary based on specific job roles or industries. Should it employ more basic presentations like pie, line or bar charts, or is there leverage depicting news results in tree maps, tag clouds, or the variety of different geographical map types (cartograms, dot distributions, and the like)? We know there isn t a definitive answer yet but we have few in mind as we roll out our next generation of Venn diagrams and tag clouds to our users, and continue our research. Acquire Media is committed to advancing news-enabled visualization in NewsEdge providing real insight for our users, rather than just geewhiz pictures that provide a moment of cool, but little else. We would love to partner with your enterprise to find out what that picture looks like for you and your team as you approach news analysis on any given day. Do you have a particular need that requires one presentation over another? Are there tools that you know will be useful but are not currently available? Data visualization for the information professional is still in its infancy stage. Let s help it grow together. Pinnacor, Hearst Corporation and CBS. Our internally managed, US-based overnight staff is tasked with operational review of news story selections, taxonomy maintenance and round-the-clock customer care. This staff includes editors, educators, and publishing professionals. The semantic algorithms team at Acquire Media comprises experts in natural language processing, pattern recognition, clustering, data mining, text parsing, adaptive neural networks, genetic algorithms, intelligent systems, numerical computation, combinatorial optimization, supercomputing, search engine internals, web spidering, indexing, data compression, largescale databases, logistic regression, and semantic taxonomies. Credentials include senior computer scientists, statisticians, and linguists, with doctorate and master s degrees from Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, and other leading academic institutions. Prior experience of our team members includes work at Oxford University Press, Morgan Stanley, Dow Jones, J.P. Morgan, Citicorp,Lucent Technologies, NEC Telecom, ADP, Hearst Digital Media, Quintiles Transnational, and many consulting firms.