Here’s a great example of how technology is enabling us to visualise information in different ways. Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.

I played around by selecting the New Zealand news feed, and cancelling out the World News, Sports and Entertainment feeds to arrive at the representation above – enabling me to narrow down on some patterns in the news specifically related to some areas of interest reported in the NZ scene.

Tools like this are the reason we must continue to engage in exploration of the notion of literacy and what it means to be literate in the 21st century.