Humble pie: helping the Guardian chart big stories through small details

Nowadays, major news events prompt millions of responses online. Every message passing through the internet has a voice. Aggregate analysis and visualization helps us see the roar of the crowd.

The Guardian first explored this last year with an award-winning graphic that replays World Cup games , condensing 90 minutes of tweets into 90 seconds of interactive animation. By juxtaposing match events with surges in word popularity, viewers can relive the ripples of human reaction passing through Twitter.

Asked to apply similar techniques to the News International saga, we partnered with Datasift to capture and display public responses during key events in the story. This talk steps through the process of recording, processing and displaying a large volume of tweets which enabled a small team to build complex pieces of interactive content at newsroom speeds.

Above all, the presentation will aim to portray the delicate balance of design, data and storytelling at the heart of interactive news content.