WorldLens: exploring world events through media

Abstract

The goal of WorldLens is to provide a visual answer to the question: "what is happening in the world?" This thesis entails the design and development of a system that provides an exploratory view into world events across varied media types. The fundamental ideas are to take a data-driven approach by crawling a broad swath of content sources, and map the resulting data into an interactive visualization. WorldLens aims to obviate the need for an a priori search term, and instead focuses on facilitating informative discovery across news content from articles, web video, and broadcast television.