A month into freshman year of college, my roommates and I built a news visualization app for CalHacks 2015, our collegiate hackathon. Not only did we end up winning first prize, but it turns out that spending 48 continuous hours with someone is a great way to get to know them.
MotivationNews today, with it's emphasis on "breaking news" coverage, tends to focus on the hyper-micro scale of time. Information is presented in isolated, fragmented chunks, and there isn't really a good way to understand how current affairs fits into larger scale narratives around historical, geo-political or economic activity. In response, we built a web application that collects daily news and curates it into a 3D globe, sorted by volume. We store the globe data each data, so over weeks or months, users can 'scroll through time' and see how news stories spread across locales, and the cascading geopolitical effects certain events have on the world.
