In addition to weekly candidate statistics and interactive charts, the US Election 2008 Web Monitor also provides the Media Watch portal, a comprehensive and continuously updated archive of media coverage on the US Election 2008.

www.ecoresearch.net/election2008/mediawatch

The archive contains all documents relevant to the US Election 2008 from the following four samples: news media, environmental organizations, Fortune 1000 companies, and political blogs. Visual methods help understand the complex semantic relationships contained in this archive (information landscape, geographic map, ontology graph and tag cloud). Extending the brief summary below, the 'Help' function of the portal provides a detailed interface description.

The upper left window shows the active document. Below, the system lists documents referring to similar topics and nearby locations. Clicking on the quotes extends the text block, clicking on the circular marker activates that particular document. Once a user enters a search query, an additional window displays a list of quotes with the target term. Besides entering query terms, users can click on ANY position in the maps (not only on the document markers) to retrieve articles related to a particular location, topic or domain concept. Changes in one window trigger an immediate update of all other displays.