GAP

December 10, 2003 7:45 AM

Global Attention Profiles. Mapping media focus.
posted by srboisvert (4 comments total)

Why did they leave out America? Oh, because it's the "default" country I suppose.

Please spare a thought for all non-Americans inundated day after day by irrelevant American news.
posted by dydecker at 8:33 AM on December 10, 2003

Nevertheless, these maps are very interesting - thanks for the link.
posted by plep at 11:30 AM on December 10, 2003

This is a great post. But what was the subject again? I forget.....maybe they'll cover it on CNN.

I like unusual information portayed through maps. I've got one such I've been planning to post, about relative rates of human inbreeding around the world.

....I wonder if anyone has mapped inbreeding among media professionals? Would this result in "unusual" news coverage by the resultant offspring ?
posted by troutfishing at 11:36 AM on December 10, 2003

I left out America because it's so hard to track in American media. To find a story about "Ghana", you can search for "Ghana" - in American newspapers, you would need to know that thousands of local place names mean that a story comes from America. (Most local stories in US papers don't include the words "USA" or "America".

I'm experimenting with some new scripts that read bylines and attempt to determine if stories are local or international - I think it would be interesting to see what percentage of news in a given medium is local...

Haven't figured out yet how to track media inbreeding - if anyone's got methodology thoughts on that, I'd be happy to try it in a new revision... :-)
posted by obruni at 5:57 AM on December 11, 2003