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Peter Cho’s “News Story Map”

Peter Cho is an artist well known for his work with words, letters, and typography.  In this specific piece, “News Story Map,” Cho creates a flow chart of words related to news stories about gay marriage in Massachusetts in May 2004.  In the upper left corner, this piece states the dates of the articles, the topic of the articles and the newspapers that these articles were from.  The newspapers include New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Boston Herald, CNN, Reuters, and Washington Times.  All of the words in the articles were put in to bubbles of various colors.  Some bubbles are black, some gray, and some an even lighter shade of gray.  The color of the word is reflective of how many times each word is used within the articles.  There is a key in the bottom right corner that indicates which colors stand for how many times each word was used.  The words “marriage,” “same sex,” and “gay” seem to be the most centrally located terms in the flow chart, and are written in white and surrounded by a black bubble.  Every word has an arrow drawn to it, connecting it to another word or several other words.  Each arrow between the words has a number that indicates how many times the words have been used in the study. The lines and arrows connecting the words are also different colors, in accordance with the relevance and usage of these terms in the articles. Outside of the central flow chart, there are several smaller flow charts that seem to not connect to the main one, yet hold enough relevant information to stand on their own.  These smaller charts contain words that are separate from the idea of gay marriage in the direct sense, but relate to the topic when looked at all together.  Some of the terms listed are just the beginnings of words, without endings so that “Constitutional” or “Constitution” would both count as the same term when being counted.  It is also interesting to see that a great deal of the words listed on the chart is either positive or neutral; there are very few clearly negative terms. Many of the terms seem to be simply defining what gay marriage in Massachusetts and seem to be terms that avoid any heavy opinion or sentiment regarding gay marriage.  Overall, the flow chart is a visual rendering of the information held within a text based media.