New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space

The New York Times' Research and Development Lab is “investigating the ideas at the edges of today and thinking about how they’re going to impact business decisions tomorrow.” Much of the R&D Lab’s work, up to now, has been focused on platforms: tablets, TVs, screens, clouds. But the group is also thinking beyond gadgetry to two big ideas that are also a preoccupation of the news industry as a whole: the social sharing of news on the one hand, and the real-time processing of data on the other. For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.