Visualization credit GDELT Project.
Dataset: Global Knowledge Graph
Description: A sequence of word clouds showing the top people mentioned in news coverage of each of the world's countries April 2013 to March 18, 2014.
Read More: Read more about this visualization on the GDELT Blog.
A key focus of GDELT in 2014 is on how to make its incredibly vast and rich datasets easier to work with and, in particular, more accessible to the non-technical community. To help unlock these incredibly unique insights into global society, we're experimenting with a range of new visualizations and other ways of interacting with GDELT's archives. The popularity of "word clouds" on the web as a way of visualizing patterns in large amounts of data got us thinking about what a "word cloud" of a world leader might look like. Towards this end, the images on this page offer a first glimpse of a new tool coming shortly that will let you create a word cloud around a leader, location, organization, or theme. In the word clouds below, the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph was scanned for all coverage of each country in the world tracked by the GDELT Daily Trends Report April 2013 to March 18, 2014. A list was compiled of every person that had appeared in a news article alongside each country and how often the name appeared in coverage mentioning that country, which was then visualized using the R "wordcloud" module to create the final visualizations you see on this page.