Weather Map: A Diachronic Visual Model for Controversy Mapping

The Weather Map is a visual model to investigate public debates onmedia. Relying on the Media Cloud archives, the visual model transforms a simplequery into a sophisticated visualization by employing the visual grammar of synop-tic weather charts. Peaks of pressure and clashes between airmasses are used to de-scribe the conflicts in media through the temporal dimension, diving into thehuman and non-human dynamics that make the controversy alive. The WeatherMap was conceived as a digital tool to help students and scholars analyze publicdebates, according to the controversy mapping field founded by Bruno Latour. Inparticular, the visual model pushes the boundaries of network visualization, explor-ing advanced techniques of graphic design. The outcome is a web-based applicationdeveloped in JavaScript and Python at the disposal of education and research.