Reading the map: filters, heatmap, and the timeline
Newsmap packs a lot into one screen. This guide walks through the controls in the order most people find useful — filtering down to what you care about, switching how density is shown, moving through time, and sharing or exporting what you find.
Start by filtering
The fastest way to make the map legible is to narrow it. The filter panel is built directly on our event taxonomy, so you can restrict the view by disorder type, event type, actor interaction, named entity, source platform, or veracity. Filters combine, so you can ask focused questions — for instance, “confirmed protests in the last day” — and the feed and the map update together.
There is also free-text search. It looks across the summary, location, actors, and source, which is handy when you are chasing a specific place, organisation, or keyword that does not map cleanly onto a category.
Markers versus the heatmap
By default the map shows individual markers, colour-coded by event category and sized to reflect severity, so you can pick out specific incidents. When you care more about where activity is concentrated than about any single event, switch to the heatmap: it trades individual detail for an at-a-glance sense of intensity across a region. Use markers to investigate, the heatmap to orient.
Moving through time
Events are inherently temporal, so the timeline scrubber lets you move through the period the map covers and watch how activity builds or subsides. Recent events are emphasised, and very fresh ones carry a “live” badge so you can tell a breaking report from one that is hours old. If a region shows a sudden spike relative to its own recent baseline, the map flags it as a surge — a cue to look closer rather than a conclusion in itself.
Country briefs and reports
Selecting a country opens a brief summarising its recent activity. For a fuller, linkable writeup — counts, the most common event types, the most active locations, and every underlying event — open the country’s page in country reports. Each event in a report links to its own page with the expanded summary and a path back to the original source.
Sharing and exporting
The map’s state lives in the URL. When you have filtered to a view worth keeping, the link captures your filters and position, so you can bookmark it or send it to someone and they will see the same thing. If you want the underlying records rather than a view, you can export the filtered set as CSV or JSON to analyse elsewhere.
A few habits worth keeping
- Read density as reporting activity first; coverage is uneven, as we explain in where our data comes from.
- Let veracity and severity guide how much you trust and how much you care about an item.
- Follow the source link before citing anything — the map is for finding, the source is for citing.
That is the whole loop: filter, switch view, move through time, then drill into an event or a region. Once it is muscle memory, the map becomes a fast way to ask precise questions of a very noisy world.