Narratives AI (beta): Quick Start Guide

Narratives AI is a powerful media research tool designed to help you understand and navigate the complex landscape of social and news media. This guide will walk you through the steps to get started with Narratives AI.

Accessing Narratives AI

Narratives AI is a new module availble in the Pulsar platform from the launchpad. (Don't have access? reach out to your account management team to discuss how to get it.)

Once you're in, you'll have access to search for anything.

Searching for Narratives

Enter a search query – Use keywords or boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) for more specific searches.
Choose a date range – Select a time period for the search.
Click Search – Execute your search and let Narratives AI do the rest.

Search Results

Macro & Micro Narrative Views

Narratives AI offers two powerful views to help you dive deeper into your analysis:

Macro Narratives:
- Provides a high-level view of broader conversations.
- Perfect for analyzing long-term trends and understanding thematic arcs.
Micro Narratives:
- Focuses on more specific events or daily developments.
- Best for real-time conversations or niche topics over short periods.

Toggle between Macro and Micro views to analyze broader trends and drill down into more granular details. The counts in each view help you quickly assess how much data is available.

Narrative themes

Narratives AI identifies and ranks the top themes emerging from your search across all detected narratives. Three key visualizations provide insights into the biggest themes:

Top Themes: A horizontal bar chart displaying the top 10 themes related to your search, ranked by volume of content. It includes the main topics of each theme (e.g., "Renewable Energy") and interest score.
Media Interest Over Time: A time series chart that compares media interest in the top 10 themes over time.
Narrative Distribution: A scatter chart showing the relationships between narratives within a theme, helping you understand how fragmented or cohesive the conversations are.

Narrative Results

Each narrative includes an automated summary and the most representative image, along with a tag for the theme and a significance score, helping you gauge its relevance.

Theme Filter: Use the drop-down to isolate results based on specific topics.
Sort Options: Organize narratives by relevance, date, significance, or length.

Click on a narrative for more details or use the "Why did this match my search?" feature to understand how the narrative is connected to your query.

View Narratives in Detail

Once you've found a narrative of interest, you can explore it further in the detailed view. Here's how:

Access the Detailed View
1. Click on a narrative from the results list on the search page to explore it.
Analyse the Narrative Trend Chart
1. View the Narrative Trend chart to see how the conversation changed over time
2. Hover over the trend chart to see the weekly topics that make up the narrative and track changes in topics as the conversation evolved
Explore Narrative Evolution
1. Visualize the narrative's structure and evolution using the Sankey chart
2. Click on the "Related Narratives" button in the legend to hide the related narratives so that you can see where the selected narrative fits in
3. Click on the related narrative bars in the chart to navigate to the related narrative
4. Click and drag the edges of the range slider to zoom in on sections of the narrative
5. Click on a point in the slider to move to that view or adjust period you are viewing
6. By changing the date at the top of the page you can view periods of related narratives that ran before and after the selected narrative.