Understanding Discovery and the Narrative Map

Search vs Discovery: search helps you locate coverage you already know you want. Discovery helps you explore and understand what’s in your coverage — the emerging themes, narratives and connections you didn’t know to look for.

 What the Narrative Map shows

The Narrative Map is built on Pipeline AI, which reads and enriches every article in your coverage and classifies what it finds — organisations, spokespeople, products, entities, themes and topics. The map surfaces these as bubbles and tags, so you can take in the whole coverage landscape at a glance, see the conversations emerging from it, and understand how they relate to one another.

These are tags discovered by the AI across your subscribed coverage — not the project tags set up for your reports and dashboards. The Narrative Map is a separate, exploratory view.

When to use it

Discovery is most valuable when you want to explore beyond what you already know. It tends to help in two situations:

• You don’t yet know what a large set of coverage is about, and want to see the dominant conversations — and anything emerging that you didn’t have visibility on.
• You already know a topic or narrative, and want to see what else is happening around it: which topics co-occur with it, and how the conversations connect.

Common uses include uncovering emerging topics, exploring the narratives around an organisation or competitor, understanding what’s associated with a particular issue, investigating what might be driving a conversation, and making sense of a large volume of coverage.

Open the Narrative Map

1. Select Discovery in the left-hand menu.
2. Select Narrative Map. It opens showing the top tags across your coverage.
3. Scroll and pan around the map to explore the tags.

 Explore co-occurrences and drill into the coverage

The Narrative Map works from the top down: start with a theme or entity, see what it appears alongside, then read the coverage behind it.

1. Select a tag or bubble — for example a product, or a theme such as regulation.
2. View its co-occurrences: the other tags that appear in the same coverage (for example taxation or public health alongside regulation).
3. Select a co-occurrence to see the articles that connect the two.
4. Open the full article list, or carry the articles through to the Articles page.

This flips the usual workflow. Instead of reading articles to work out what they’re about, you start from the AI-extracted themes and follow the connections down to the coverage.

Select a tag to see what it co-occurs with

 

 

Drill down to the coverage behind a connection

 

 

 Focus the map with filters

The Narrative Map respects your filters, so you can point it at exactly the coverage you want to explore:

• Date range and tier — narrow to a period or to tier-one coverage to see the top tags for just that slice.
• Coded coverage — if your project includes coded coverage, filter to it to see the tags coming through. This can also surface themes that aren’t yet part of your coded set — a useful cue for what to track going forward.
• Smart filters — filter by tag type (for example spokespeople only). See Rank spokespeople and competitors over time.

Understand the counts

• The map samples the top 100 tags — your coverage contains far more tags than can be shown at once.
• You’ll usually see more mentions than articles, because a single article can carry several tags.

Need more help? If the map isn’t showing what you expect, contact your CARMA representative or support team, and include the project, the date range and any filters you’ve applied.