NY Times: Project Cascade
https://www.fastcompany.com/1749756/infographic-day-cascade-new-york-timess-tool-tracking-how-news-spreads-video
The New York Times Research & Development Lab has created a 3D visualization tool that displays the history of a single social-media event. Project Cascade takes an isolated event, like a tweet, and tracks its entire chain of reactions leading to this point, showing how users interact with the story and each other. The timeline displays not only the distance between conversations, but also the degrees of separation, combining the two to give a complete ecosystem of the conversation.
For instance, if I were to stumble upon an article and share it on Twitter, a friend may see that and retweet it. From there, their friends may find it fascinating, and thus the cascade has begun, spreading this story and spinning its network. This demonstrates the concept of information cascades, in which people are influenced by others in a network, listening to and adopting their ideas as they spread among the group. Cascade considers this phenomenon with an emphasis on the sharing of news articles, capturing and displaying the entire lifespan of a story. As such, Cascade developers see this as an opportunity for newspapers to capitalize on the very media that so threatens them. By understanding the nature of viral articles and the origins of popularity, newspapers hope to shorten the journey stories take between publication and interested readers.