PLUM: Contextualizing News For Communities Through Augmentation

The transition of print media into a digital form allows the tailoring of news for different audiences. This thesis presents a new approach to tailoring called augmenting. Augmenting makes articles more informative and relevant to the reader. The PLUM system augments news on world-wide natural disasters that readers often find remote and irrelevant. Using community profiles, PLUM automatically compares facts reported in an article to the reader's home community. The reader, browsing through annotations which PLUM generates, discovers, for example, the number of people affected by the disaster as a percentage of the home town population. The reader can also view the article augmented for other communities. By contextualizing disaster articles and making them more informative, PLUM creates a sense of connectedness. Thesis Advisor: Kenneth B. Haase Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences This research was sponsored by the News in the Future Consortium. PLUM: Contextualizing News For Communities Through Augmentation