In our book, The Discourse of News Values, chapter 8 analyses the construction of news values in ‘most shared’ news. These are online news items whose URLs were shared many times among users via Facebook. We used Share Wars’ Likeable Engine (http://likeable.share-wars.com/) to extract the top items by total Facebook share counts as at early September 2014. These most shared news items came from US, UK, Australian and New Zealand news outlets. We analysed the photograph, headline and opening paragraph for the construction of news values, and found that interesting patterns could be observed in the construction of news values not just within mode (e.g. in all of the headlines) but also across modes – so in the combination of headline and photograph, for example.

Demonstrating these intersemiotic relations in a static, written text was impossible, thus we created a dynamic visualization tool for representing these relations: Kaleidographic (Figure 1). The resulting visualization, created using the Kaleidographic Builder Tool, is designed to allow audiences to experience the various ways in which news values combine with each other (e.g. you can observe that Negativity often combines with Impact) and where these news values are constructed (e.g. in the headline, or photograph or both). To see the visualization in action, click here or on the diagram below. We recommend you also read chapter 8 of our book to learn more about this dataset, how we analysed it and to see the results in more static configurations.

Video explanations of Kaleidographic and how to manipulate the different elements of the visualizations and what they mean can be found here. If the visualization doesn’t appear or start playing, we recommend you update or change your browser (e.g. to Chrome).