What are channel insights and where can I find them?

The ‘Channel Insights’ charts are all about giving on overview of the channel you are looking at. They are part of the WTiN Discovery set of features on WTiN.com and are located on all of the channels on the website (Insight and Intelligence channels). The exact location of the charts on each of the channel homepages is slightly different depending on the overall layout of the page. Consisting of two charts; the ‘Company Drill-Down’ chart and the ‘Sentiment Tracker’ chart the data you are seeing when looking at the charts is specific to the channel that you are viewing. For example, if you are on the Insight > Nonwovens channel then the data is related to the nonwovens industry sector, if you are looking at the Intelligence > Smart Textiles channel then it’s all about smart textiles and related sectors. Each of the charts is described in more detail below so have a scroll down and if you have any questions at all then please checkout the section/form at the bottom of the page.

Who should use the channel insights feature?

The feature is all about giving an aggregated view of the industry sector you are interested in. You should use the tool if you are interested in finding the main influencing companies in the sector and drilling-down to find content on wtin.com relating to those companies. You can also use the tool to track sentiment trend (see here for more about sentiment) relating to the sector.

The companies drill-down chart in detail

Want to know who are the key players in the sector and find out more about them? The company drill-down chart takes the top 15 companies (by mention count) over the last 12 months and plots them onto a tree diagram. The size of the sector for each company shows the relevance they have to the sector. You can click on any of the 15 companies to ‘drill-down’ to article level. Here you are seeing the top 10 articles relating to that company (by the companies relevance to the article) over the last 12 months. You can see this by hovering over them as well. Don’t forget to zoom into a bigger view of the chart by clicking the magnifying glass icon. You can see an example of the chart at both company and drilled-down article level to the right/below.

The companies drill-down at company level

The companies drill-down at article level

The sentiment tracker chart in detail

The sentiment tracker chart is a really great way of getting an overall picture of how things are moving in the relevant industry sector. The link here explains more about sentiment, what it is and how it is computed. Every piece of content that we write or aggregate onto wtin.com is reviewed and a sentiment score between -1 and +1 calculated. The sentiment of an individual article or piece of text is interesting, but where is becomes truly insightful is when data are aggregated over a subset of data. That subset could be a sector, a company, a geographical region or even a person. This chart shows the aggregation of sentiment scores over time for a given channel (sector) and as a result shows how the sector is being perceived through time. For example, is there a lot of positivity around new developments and technologies in the smart textiles segment driving positive sentiment or are difficult trading conditions and pricing slumps causing negative sentiment in the fibres and yarns sector? Sentiment is a great tool for answering these sorts of questions. We also show the number of articles that have been analysed to determine the sentiment score. This can be relevant where the number is relatively low in some of our newer channels (Textile 4.0 for example) as lower article counts (below around 75 a month) can lead to less accurate sentiment averages.

The channel sentiment tracker chart

The (kind of) small print bit

So, what’s the ‘caveat’. We thought we should add this little comment at the end! Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are ever evolving as are the tools on wtin.com. They are not perfect, but are getting better over time! They already provide a unique and novel way for the user to discover new information, data and trends. You might see some examples where similar company names that are obviously the same are represented different, e.g., ‘ABCD’ and ‘ABCD Inc.’ or you might see an entity that is a person listed as an organisation. These instances are rare, but we do know they are there and are working hard to improve the features all the time!

Want to know more?