2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

Media archives are increasingly turning to digital platforms such as social networks to make their collections more accessible and relevant to their audiences. To fulfil these outward-facing ambitions and showcase the value of archival collections to the general public and creators in the media sector, media archives need the right tools to be able to effectively promote their digital content. In particular, organisations require support in seizing the right opportunities to actively participate in societal discussion, using their archival materials to contextualise contemporary topics.

This presentation introduces Topics Compass, a visual analytics dashboard developed in the EU-funded research project ReTV and based on the webLyzard Web intelligence platform, which assists media archives in identifying opportunities to reuse their digital collections through the extraction and prediction of topics of interest among the online audience. It does this by monitoring discussions in news and social media channels across multiple languages and uses data visualisations to provide insights into topics that are currently gaining attention or will be popular in the future, aligning them to digital assets available in the archival collection. The semantic technologies underlying the dashboard extract emerging stories and yield both factual and affective knowledge. A rich portfolio of interactive visualisations presents the results, including a trend chart, stream graph, word tree and geographic map. As a result, media archives can make informed, data-driven decisions about how their content could be leveraged in online publications (e.g. blogs, social media) to contextualise and inform contemporary debates. In our presentation, we will demonstrate the capabilities of the dashboard and present a use case on how media archives can use the dashboard and its predictive capabilities in a social media publication strategy.