Designing The News

After just completing a static news visualisation, I realised the way I linked the stories and authors together was in a serial fashion. That is to say, I linked the stories along a path that progressed from one story to the next in order of the position they appeared in the paper, but they could of been linked in other ways.

I want to see in which situations certain linking conventions would be best, so I’ve decided to do a little relation research and theory.

Serial linking

Linking a series of items that connect to one another via the next in line, i.e. 1 links to 2, 2 links to 3, but 1 can’t link to 3 directly, it has to go through 2.

For what I’ve been working on recently, minus the poster I just created, I think the use of serial linking would be best used on things that are constant, for example ‘time and date’. Using this method would offer a simpler way of relating items to one another, but may offer a more conscise set of relations.

Parallel linking

Linking items together by direct contact with each other, i.e. 1 links to everything it wants to, 2 links to everything it wants to, etc. etc.

Using parallel linkage would offer a wider set of relations, as one story would link out to infinite number of other related items directly without going through a neighbour. However with the wider set of relations, all may not be as closely related to one another as with the serial linking.