Paper #1 - [DIS 2012] Discursive Navigation of Online News

This paper was concerned with developing a new way in which to think about and implement a new way of navigating online news that is closer to the ways in which our brains process information and memories, delving into discursive models like Foucault's Discursive Formations and Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizome (both of which are adequately detailed in the paper itself to provide a good basic understanding) in order to arrive at a possible solution.

The solution arrived at in the paper (that of a networked structure of nodes grouped emotionally and in terms of subject matter, which can be dialed to the user's inclination) is interesting in and of itself as an alternative way of looking at news items in aggregate, but my main interest in this paper is in the possible applications of this mode of thinking to all manner of written media online, not just news sites.

As the paper mentions, nearly all news sites are largely static, hidebound places delineated strictly into sections and sub-sections, where moving from one article of interest to another across sections is prohibitively difficult. I spend a lot of time reading articles on websites like these, some news, some games journalism sites, some opinion pieces, and they all have the blog problem - each piece is largely isolated. What I like about this paper is that it posits the idea of a holistic online reading experience, where pieces can be seen in situ as part of a continuum of other writing and reportage, public opinion, and larger events.

Many of us - though I can only speak for myself, I suppose - tend to want to treat the internet as an extension of immediate thought processes, constantly tapping in to current events and flipping from place to place at the speed of, well, thought. This, unfortunately, usually leaves us floundering without a good idea of the bigger picture (I mean, unless we tune our Twitter feed just right), getting news piecemeal from single, disparate sources. The idea of a thoughtfully discursive and relational way of viewing reportage online such as that posited in this paper is a seductive one, especially to fidgety digital magpies like myself.

Symon Oliver, Guia Gali, Fanny Chevalier, and Sara Diamond. 2012. Discursive navigation of online news. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 82-85. DOI=10.1145/2317956.2317970 http://doi.acm.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2317956.2317970