BBC News Archive

As well as the home page archive, I try and maintain an archive of the BBC News front page, which can be used to generate some interesting data. Welcome to the Tardis.

Disclaimer: As these are just prototypes, some of these require JavaScript to work properly and aren't guaranteed to work in everything (though I hope they do).

Tag Clouds

An interesting way of summarising the BBC headlines.

History of individual stories

A timeline, both visual and textual, for each unique story mentioned on the front page. For example, the history of #4771586, Crash lands shock Oscar triumph. This is interlinked from the other prototypes.

Searches

Image Search

This prototype searches the headline text and alternate text of photos used to illustrate stories on the front page of BBC News, and displays the photos that match: (e.g. Clarke)

Category Search

Search headlines by category using this prototype:

Headline Search

This prototype searches the headline text for stories on the front page of BBC News: (e.g. Iran)

Search

This general search prototype looks through the headline text and accompanying text for stories on the front page of BBC News, linking through to the timeline prototype. (e.g. Clinton)

Categories

An improved version of a current prototype, showing the distribution over time by category of headlines.

Image timeline

Displaying all the pictures used to illustrate front page stories, the image timeline provides a visual overview of a month's news. This page is large, and can be slow to load.

Story timelines

Any combination of stories can be plotted on a visual timeline. The system also lets you store one you've created (by using the search) with a title for ease of access; for example, the timeline of Big Brother 2007.

Metadata

The following dates are missing from my archive and prototypes, due to various problems such as server failures:

2005
1st–3rd, 5th–7th, 30th November; 6th–31st December
2006
26th January, 4th–5th September, 25th–31st October, 13th–18th and 27th–30th November, 11th–21st December

The following dates are missing from the archive, but are still in the prototypes, as the summary files were made before I lost the archived archive:

2006
1st–24th October

Tagcloud generation code mostly from Chriag Mehta's code. Slider by Erik Arvidsson.