We are truly excited to introduce Connected China, a Reuters News site that tracks and visualizes the people, organizations and relationships that form China’s elite power structure. (Check out our promo video.)
Employing novel design and HTML 5 technologies, Connected China explains the social and professional networks of China’s leaders, highlighting the interpersonal relationships that drive business, move markets and shape the political landscape in the world’s most populous nation.
The site also provides a rich interactive platform to showcase the best of Reuters’ coverage on Chinese politics, providing deep insight into China’s new generation of leaders with immersive, seamless integration of data, text, photos and video.
The project represents a new approach for Reuters News a model to take the reporting we do every day about people, institutions, power and relationships and put it in a format that gives it sustained significance over time.
Connected China is the culmination of 18 months of research, reporting, design and development, culminating in an app that draws on a database containing:
Tens of thousands of entities people, organizations, events
More than 30,000 relationships
1.5 million words (equivalent to more than 20 non-fiction books!)
Adhering to Reuters’ high journalistic standards, we have structured inherently qualitative relationships the connections between people (family, mentorship, rivalry, alliances), the importance of particular job roles, the power dynamic between the various institutions that govern China. By quantifying and categorizing these complex relationships, we break from the constraints of long-form text and allow new ways of communicating and interpreting this acquired knowledge.
By harnessing the collective intelligence gathered by a global team of reporters and editors, we can derive deeper insight to the political, societal and economic implications of these connections.
Baseball has sabermetrics; we’re trying to develop the field of sinometrics.
But it wasn’t enough to collect and categorize this information we wanted to find new ways to communicate. Working with Boston-based Fathom Information Design, led by data visualization guru Ben Fry, we built an app that presents this deep reporting on a striking and groundbreaking platform.
Connected China is built to be a rich interactive experience and is optimized for iPad and modern browsers that support HTML 5 and CSS 3. iPad 2 and 3, as well as Chrome and Safari browsers are recommended.
We look forward to hearing from you! You can reach us at connectedchina thomsonreuters.com and keep up with the latest updates, as well as original reporting and analysis on the blog.
Get started with our video tutorials, or just dive right in.
