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Version for Microsoft
Version for Mac
Source Code

Premise
This project is based on the talk by Ethan Zuckerman in Applications, Fall 2008. He postulated that the world was becoming more insular because news sources focused so tightly on a few small areas, while missing the news in others. Overlooked News uses the New York Times to chart out what news articles are being reported right now, and locates articles from countries the New York Times has chosen to overlook.

Findings
The new York times consistently covers the US, Western Europe, and a few Asian cities, while rarely reporting African or South American news. Even articles such as changes of state sometimes took back seat.

Technical Challenges
The Overlooked News project uses a large number of files, and is very data intensive. Because location bylines occur in an article itself, not in an XML feed, the processing time can be long, and it is easy for errors to slip through. Additionally, the repetitive motion of hitting the news servers over and over mean that my server has been blacklisted from Yahoo and Google. The Final version uses all continent xml feeds from the NYtimes, and the overlooked Articles come from the BBC.

File Structure:
ArticleAssigner.php
ArticleHarvester.php
Main.pde
DatabaseHandler.pde
MapItem.pde
Scenery.pde

Table Structure
CountryInfo
Location
ExtraCountryInfo
Location Mismatch
NYTArticle
NYTArticleTemp
Overlooked
OverlookedTemp

Future Updates
This was meant to work as a stand-alone applet - I would like people to be able to log in to a webpage and get a snapshot of how insular the New York Times is today. Unfortunately, it's too heavy right now and doesn't work as an applet. There are also a few bugs in scrolling and article representation.