WHY & WHAT
Sanlian Lifeweek (a weekly magazine), is always one of my favorite media in China, which takes its mission as “being a faithful chronicler in the new era”. In recent several years, I’d realized some changes about it.
Except for the quality of in-depth reports, its covers also are going through some changes, no matter in terms of visual or literal contents.
But how exactly have they changed?
In order to answer this question, I decided to do a project, trying to explore the changes in the contents on the covers of Sanlian Lifeweek from 2003 to 2018.
HOW
In order to answer the question above, I first need to break it down to two parts, which is who are the people in the images on the cover of Sanlian Lifeweek and what are the stories in its headlines.
The second step is further breaking each of the two questions into more detailed questions by classifying “people” and “stories” with multiple standards.
In the current stage, the most difficult part for me is to build a tree of questions to classify all the “stories”, to include all the contents of the headlines throughout 16 years.
This question tree is really far from perfect. I really need time to refine it with more data being collected and classified.
Somehow, I felt it’s amusing to think about this process as data training. The only difference is that, instead of a machine, it’s me to be trained with all the data in order to build up this model! And the task of labeling is just a torture, for our culture, is so introvert that there are so many metaphors in the headlines. It’s really hard to imagine a machine can replace me at least in this case!
For my readers…
When I envisioned the reading experience of my readers, considering the data structure of each section, I summarised it as “explore information along the hierarchy (of question tree) across the time frames” for the section of “stories” and “explore information by combining the controlled factors across the time frames” for “people”.
The graphic beneath is a simple prototype of this vision, for more details, especially about the interactions on the page, I think it is better to build it into reality than describe it by words — at least after I build it.
And in order to make all the fantastic effects happen in my project — just bless me surviving in the wild world of D3.js!
