GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive18 charts

Charts About the News, 2008–2010

The only collection here with a timestamp you can check against a front page.

Eighteen charts, and this is the only collection in the archive with a verifiable external clock. Every entry responds to something that was on a front page in a particular week, which means the dates are not incidental — they are the content.

The coverage charts

The most interesting group here does not plot the event. It plots the reporting of the event, which is a harder and more useful thing to draw. % of People who hate Michael Jackson, according to date is the archive’s best example: a step change at a single date, plotting public sentiment as a function of one piece of news. Seven domains still link to it. One of them is a Wikipedia talk-page archive, where a single editor posted it as a summary of their own feelings about the coverage, a joke chart surfacing, briefly, inside somebody else’s argument rather than making one.

Press Coverage of Obama, CNN News Coverage July 2009, National Media Election Coverage and You Know the Media is Blowing Something Out of Proportion When…. all work the same seam. Four charts, four readers, one shared observation about proportion, drawn independently across ten months.

The panic curve

Fear of Swine Flu vs. Knowledge is a two-axis chart with an inverse relationship and it is, as far as this archive gets, a real epidemiological communication point: concern peaks where information is thinnest. Published as its own plate, three links from other sites.

SWINE FLU (H1N1) arrives six months later, when the story had turned into a seasonal footnote, and plots the deflation. Read as a pair they are a better record of that news cycle than either alone.

Will the LHC create a black hole? from September 2008 is the same shape of joke about a different scare, and Popular Thoughts About Global Climate Change holds two sites still link to it, the one subject here that never resolved into a footnote.

Single stories, dated precisely

Toyota sudden acceleration incidents is from March 2010, in the middle of the recall. NASA in the News is linked from two sites, and plots an agency’s visibility rather than its work. Respect For Pluto Over Time and Poor Pluto… are two charts, fourteen months apart, about a reclassification that a surprising number of people took personally, the second is linked from two sites.

Winners of Miss Universe, World cup mistakes 2 and The vuvuzela explained are the 2010 tail: three charts about three summer stories, all with the image lost, all still holding the address somebody linked.

What the collection is for

A joke about the news has the shortest shelf life of anything in this archive. Almost none of these is funny now. What they are instead is a sample of what a large online audience considered over-covered, at eighteen specific moments between September 2008 and July 2010, drawn by people with no stake in the coverage.

That is not a dataset anyone set out to produce, and it is the reason this collection is worth keeping at its original addresses rather than summarised.

Charts here
18
Images recovered
13
Published as plates
3
Referring domains
33
First posted
Sep 2008
Last posted
Jul 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    National Media Election Coverage

    · 2 domains still link here

  2. A2

    Will the LHC create a black hole?

    · Drawn by Joram H

  3. A3

    NASA in the News

    · Drawn by Karnage · 2 domains still link here

  4. A4

    Fear of Swine Flu vs. Knowledge

    · Drawn by heat_fan1 · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  5. A5

    People killed this month

    · Drawn by DanWroteThis · 4 domains still link here · published as a plate

  6. A6

    You Know the Media is Blowing Something Out of Proportion When….

    · Drawn by wickedsweetcake

  7. A7

    Press Coverage of Obama

    · Drawn by billsklar

  8. A8

    % of People who hate Michael Jackson, according to date

    · 7 domains still link here · published as a plate

  9. A9

    CNN News Coverage July 2009

    · Drawn by thejonshow

  10. A10

    SWINE FLU (H1N1)

    · Drawn by pianoknight

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Respect For Pluto Over Time

    · Drawn by samuelm · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Popular Thoughts About Global Climate Change

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Toyota sudden acceleration incidents

    · Drawn by wtfwtflol

  15. B4

    Winners of Miss Universe

    · Drawn by Rafacombr · image not recovered

  16. B5

    The vuvuzela explained

    · image not recovered

  17. B6

    World cup mistakes 2

    · image not recovered

  18. B7

    Usefulness of Vuvuzela after the world cup.

    · Drawn by arthur.154

  19. B8

    Poor Pluto…

    · Drawn by matornot · 2 domains still link here

Queries answered

What makes this collection different from the others?

Every chart in it responds to a dated event. That makes it the only part of the archive that can be checked against a news record, and it is why several of these charts hold links from people writing about media coverage rather than about humour.

Which chart here travelled furthest?

% of People who hate Michael Jackson, according to date, from June 2009, linked from seven sites — including a Wikipedia talk-page archive, where one editor posted it as a summary of their own reaction to the coverage. It is published as its own plate.

Are there charts about swine flu?

Two. Fear of Swine Flu vs. Knowledge from May 2009, published as its own plate, and SWINE FLU (H1N1) from November of the same year. Together they bracket the whole arc of the story, from the panic to the aftermath.

What is the vuvuzela chart?

Usefulness of Vuvuzela after the world cup., from July 2010, a chart with a single value at zero, drawn days after the tournament that made the instrument briefly unavoidable. A second vuvuzela entry from June survives as a title only.

Why do some entries have no image?

The original images were hosted on a service that now errors for all of them, so each was recovered from a surviving copy. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address.