From the post:
Locus is a news archive visualisation that maps Guardian articles to places over time – a spatial & temporal mapping of events and media attention in the last decade. We’re using the Guardian Open Platform because it provides an API that can be queried by date, and an archive going back over 10 years.
Each place is represented as a geo located dot that changes scale in proportion to that places appearance in news articles over time. As the time slider selection changes the circles grow and shrink giving a picture of which locations are in the news at any given time. To see the all the news articles mapped, you can extend the time slider to the full search period. You can click on the places to see the news headlines for that place and time period. The headlines link through to the online articles at the Guardian.
There are two versions of the project: Locus Afganistan, and Locus Iraq.
Very cool!
Now just imagine that time was your scope for a location you selected on the map and by choosing a location + time, a set of results were merged and returned.
That may or may not help to answer the question of who knew what when? But it is a place to start.
(I first saw this at: Is it Data or Art? Check out these Newsworthy Visualizations from the BBC)