Visualizing the Evolution of Groups of Politicians Mentioned in the News

In this paper, we describe a tool to visualize and explore communities of politicians arising from mentions in news articles, combining techniques from network analysis and visual analytics. With this tool one can explore the communities, their organization according to parties, with whom a politician was mentioned with in a given year, or key political events, like the emergence of a new prime-minister. User tests involving our tool, and a collection of Portuguese news articles for a period of 10 years, have shown the interest on this kind of tool, and its applicability to analyze group evolution.