A Look Back At Mapping 2013's "The Global Conversation" And Ahead To The Future

 November 29, 2023

One decade ago we mapped "The Global Conversation" for the December 2013 print edition of Foreign Policy Magazine that coincided with Kalev being named as one of FP's Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, creating an iconic image of the incredible potential of mapping our global media at planetary scale. The vision of this image was to take the first steps into visualizing our globalized world by drawing together the events, narratives, beliefs, emotions and even dreams and fears of our entire world into a single digital twin of life on earth. As we announced earlier this month at Web Summit, we are reimagining this vision a decade later through the power of the massive AI advances of the past year, which you can see a glimpse of in Kalev's Web Summit stage talk. Stay tuned for a an incredible series of first steps into this vision over the coming months.

You can read below the original announcement one decade ago of this vision:

What happens when you take six months of news coverage from around the world and compile a list of every person mentioned and the people they were mentioned alongside? You get a network of 3 million points connected by 42 million links. Based on the Global Knowledge Graph — a massive compilation of the world's people, organizations, locations, themes, emotions, and events — this visualization highlights the 25,000 newsmakers mentioned most frequently from April to October 2013 and the 100,000 connections among them. This visualization is, in essence, a snapshot of the global conversation — not only whom we are talking about and how much, but how each separate discussion is connected to every other discussion and the greater whole. It's a new way of gauging what matters to us, and it's just one of the ways in which big data is changing the way we see the world.

You can see the underlying raw data visualization below, compiled from the GKG 1.0, formed into a co-occurrence graph with BigQuery and visualized using Gephi:

You can also see the final print magazine spreads below, reproduced with permission of Foreign Policy Magazine: