About TextMap

What is TextMap?
Are you a commercial site?
How do you get your news text?
What are entities?
What are sources?
How can I locate a given entity?
Why does my search return no results?
What does "Coref./Ref." in entity pages mean?
What happens if I click the blue and orange "Coref./Ref." symbol?
What does "Popularity Time Series" in entity page mean?
What does "Heatmap" in entity page mean?

What is TextMap?
TextMap tracks references to people, places, and things appearing in news text, so as to identify meaningful relationships between them. TextMap monitors the state of the world by analyzing both the temporal and spatial distribution of these entities. We currently analyze over 1000 domestic and international news sources every day. TextMap uses natural language processing techniques to identify entity references and a variety of statistical techniques to analyze the juxtapositions between them.

Are you a commercial site?
No.  TextMap is a research project lead by Steven Skiena at the Computer Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook. TextMap is an academic research project, not a commercial operation.  However, TextMap technology is available for licensing through the Research Foundation at Stony Brook University.

How do you get your news text?
TextMap employs a collection of well-behaved spidering programs. The TextMap project is committed to obeying the terms of service of every text source we analyze. In particular, none of text we download will ever be reproduced, redistributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast.  We present only statistical news analysis from many combined sources. We respect all robot.txt files and never make more than one request per second to any news source.

What are entities?
Entities are people, places, and things such as companies, cities, universities, drugs, websites, and countries. TextMap identifies interesting entities by analyzing online news text from a wide variety of news sources.Each given entity gets its own page,where we identify other entities which which it shares significant relationships. Important associations are identified on each of three different time scales namely cumulative analysis, references over the last 30 days and references over the last 7 days.
Similar: What does "Coref./Ref." in entity pages mean?

What are sources?
Sources are online newspapers that we analyze every day.
For each news source, we maintain a information page which presents a graphical analysis of the news articles by time and article type.
For example, check out our source page for the Newsday.
We also identify entities which are over-represented (and under-represented) in the given source relative to its peers.

How can I locate a given entity?
Type in the full name of your favorite entity into the search window and click the "Search!" button.
If you are lucky, you will go directly to the entity page you requested.
If your query matches multiple entities, you will be presented with a table of candidate entities.

Another approach is to track down your entity through our entity indices,
which are broken down by first letter and type.  Click the "Entities" button on the main page.

Our search engine is not (yet) competition for Google, so one final approach is to ask Google to find your query with the term TextMap added to the search.  Presumably we will be the top entry.

Why does my search return no results?
There are two possible explanations.
First, TextMap is not aware of your entity of interest.
All TextMap entities are extracted from online news sources.
If you want your own page on TextMap you must do something newsworthy!

The other possibility is that your entity is present but your search was inadequate. To do better, check out:
Similar: How can I locate a given entity?

What does "Coref./Ref." mean in entity pages?
References track the frequency with which we observe a given entity through our corpus of news articles.
Coreferences track the frequencies with which two given entities appear together in news articles.
In our graphic depiction, the length of orange bar is a function of the entity references while the length of the blue bar is a function of entity coreferences.
A higher ratio of blue implies a stronger relationship between the two entities.

What happens if I click the blue and orange "Coref./Ref." symbol?
Clicking on the Coref./Ref. bar gives links to recent articles in which both entities appear together.

What does the "Popularity Time Series" present?
The popularity time series graph tracks daily fluctuations in the reference frequency of popular entities over the last 30 days.
Entities are partitioned by article type (news, sports, business, etc.) to highlight the nature of the references as a function of time.

What is the "Heatmap" on an entity?
We have developed a geographic model of news influence which enables us to gauge the relative amount of exposure a given entity has received at every locale in the continental United States.
Our news heatmaps present the our results for select entities.
Particularly interesting is monitoring the relative interest among cities, states, and local personalities.