Post Modern News

• PostModernNews searches twitter.
• PostModernNews deconstructs a collection of documents (messages) into a bag-of-words, replacing syntax with a graphic re-arrangement of terms that the reader must re-associate to assert meaning.

The gentle reader can select two routes to retrieve the news.

• Enter search terms directly in the box labeled Deconstruct twitter and click the search button.
• Click on a link in one of the expandable categories: Trends, Politics, Editorial, etc.

Both methods move the viewer to the download page where the status of your request is displayed. (Be patient!) When processing is finished the viewer is moved to the final Active-GalaXy page.

PostModernNews is interactive. The Active-GalaXy page displays a bag-of-words and an image that clusters the documents through the use of links and boundaries. Relationships between terms will be found in several ways:

• Some relationships are drawn.
• Others are implied with boundaries, solid or porous.
• Many only appear when queried with the cursor.

This screen shot shows one corner of an Active-GalaXy page, with a visible image map, created from a set of British news headlines. By holding the cursor over the word climate or over the region of the image with the labels Climate or #climate the co-occurring words obama, copenhagen, world and others will be highlighted. (Can you make a sentence from these words, thus reconstructing and asserting meaning?)

Double-clicking on the word climate or the corresponding region of the image will create a list of documents (messages) similar to the one below. Clicking on any orange square will display that complete document.

The image map is not always visible. If the left-hand corner looks like the screen shot below, click on the orange bar to show the map. This map is a 2-D representation of all the messages. Click on any map area to see the full list.

The menu on the left-hand side works as follows:

• The Previous and Next items will navigate to the results of identical searches that either preceded or follow the current search.
• The Home item is a link to the main PostModernNews page.