Discourse Lines: Visualising Current Policy and Media Storylines of Opportunity and Disadvantage with Narrative Exploration Maps

Abstract

Topics of disadvantage are often discussed in the media. The discourse of disadvantage is multidimensional and has many intersecting elements, with some issues more common than others (e.g. violence, addiction), and some tending to co-occur, like human rights, criminal justice, and health to name just a few common themes. Here, we introduce and describe “Discourse Lines”, an online interactive visualisation to discover which co-occurring disadvantage issues are being discussed in the media, and which ones are left out and obscured. The visualisation presents an AI-assisted analysis of news articles on topics of discourse. Our multi-scale architecture metro map visualisation invites users to drill down from a topics overview landing map to topic-specific metro maps until individual news articles. This dynamic platform allows users to see how discourse on topics of disadvantage unfolds and how news conflates or separates various issues over time.