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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Help topics

What is ONDA?
What can I see on the front page?
What is a treemap, and what can it tell me?
What are FAQs?
What is 'topical diversity'?
What can I see on the source page?
What can I see on the cluster page?
What can I see on the clusters page?
What can I see on the sources page?
What's the yellow box on the right?
What can I see on the contact page?
What can I see on the disclaimer page?

What is ONDA?

ONDA is a news aggregator displaying groups of articles in interactive ways, using a clean, simple interface to present interesting statistics about news sources and their topical diversity.

What can I see on the front page?

The front page shows you a treemap of the top five stories in the past 24 hours. The top stories are the topics which have had the most articles clustered into them, so basically they're determined by size.

What is a treemap, and what can it tell me?

A treemap is a way of visualizing hierarchical data in an intuitive way. Each section of the treemap corresponds to a value for something, such a topic size or the number of articles contributed by a source. The larger the section as a proportion of the entire treemap, the higher the value of whatever it's representing.

What are FAQs?

FAQs are Frequently Asked Questions. If you're having trouble using the site, and have a question, it's likely to be answered in one of these.

What is 'topical diversity'?

Topical Diversity refers to the diversity 'score' which ONDA has assigned to a source for a certain time period (and perhaps other parameters). It refers to the number of topics/clusters a source is covering in a given period, such as a day, as a proportion of all the topics covered by all sources on that day. For example, the Guardian may have a score of 0.4 on one day, meaning 40% of the topics of the day were covered by the Guardian, but the Mail may have 0.5, which is a higher score meaning 50% of the topics were covered.

What can I see on the source page?

The source page gives a brief description of the source you're viewing (e.g. the Guardian, the Telegraph, etc) and shows its diversity score in a given time period. If you've specified a single-day time period using the filter, then a bar graph comparing the topical diversity scores of all the sources will be shown, otherwise a line graph of the scores changing over time will be shown.

What can I see on the cluster page?

The cluster page tells you about the development of a topic cluster over time. First we see a line graph with the number of articles from each of the sources as well as a total daily and a running total between the specified dates. Then, a list of all the articles in the cluster is given, along with their source. Click one of the article titles and it'll take you directly to the article page on website of the newspaper it originated from.

What can I see on the clusters page?

By default, the clusters page shows a treemap with the top five topics which have been entirely active (beginning and ending) within the past week, though the filter can be changed to whatever time period you like, as well as setting a different limit and a different range type, such as "last active within" or "originating in"

What can I see on the sources page?

The sources page shows both a pie chart and a treemap of the newspaper sources by their contribution to the overall collection of articles. Click on the the section of the treemap for the source you want more information about and you can look deeper into the contribution and topical diversity of that source.

What's the yellow box on the right?

This is the cluster dropbox. In order to improve ONDA's accuracy, you can suggest two or more clusters to merge if their topics are similar enough to warrant it. Just drag a link to a cluster into the dropbox to register it, click submit when you're done. If you want to edit the ones you've chosen just expand the box with the arrow on it's left, and hit the cross next to the clusters you want to remove from the proposed merger.

What can I see on the contact page?

Quite simply a contact form. If you want to send an email to the creator of ONDA, do it here. You'll need to prove you're human, but apart from that it's pretty straightforward.