U.S. News Map
Jason A. Heppler · Journal of American History · 2017
The U.S. News Map by the Georgia Tech Research Institute and eHistory.org offers a way to explore the National Digital Newspaper Project's Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers database through a map of papers and their location of publication between 1789 and 1922. A keyword search function reveals every location where the term appears in a newspaper publication, with points of lighter or darker hues depending on the number of hits in a particular place. Clicking on points presents a date-sorted list of newspapers with direct links to the digitized articles. This is a useful way of moving from the macro perspective of seeing all locations where a search term appears to a close reading of the articles themselves. Users are presented two additional ways of interacting with the map. One is an ability to animate a timeline to watch a search term appear in publications on a yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily interval. Users are also presented with a line chart, which appears to indicate the frequency of a search term over the range of years selected. However, no legends or explanation exist for this chart, so it is unclear what is being measured.