Ever wonder how news stories are connected? Now there is a way to visualize them -  as social networks. I just discovered this interesting little tool to visualize daily events:

From News Dots:

“Like Kevin Bacon’s co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.”

Noshir Contractor, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, talks about his research on social networks. Nosh is the director of the SONIC network research center, which has partnered with ANN to study scientific collaboration in virtual teams.

(via the Center for Internet Research)