Creating a Workspace

This articles gets you started using Narratives by walking you through how to build a Workspace.

Workspaces are the basis for using PeakMetrics Narratives product.  A Workspace defines the part of the media that you're interested in analyzing and want to monitor for Narratives.

Once you've defined a Workspace, PeakMetrics will automatically identify and track clusters of related stories in that workspace (what we call a Narrative).  Learn more about Narratives here.

Get Started

Navigate to the Narratives Product by clicking the Narratives icon in the left sidebar of the PeakMetric's dashboard.

Create your Query

Click Build New Workspace to create your Workspace.  From the default search, you can enter different combinations of keywords and phrases.  

  • Include all of these phrases will search articles for mentions of every word or phrase entered.
  • Include at least one of these phrases will search for articles that include at least one, but not necessarily all of the entered items.
  • Exclude all of these phrases will exclude articles that mention any of the entered words or phrases.

To generate the most meaningful Narratives, you might find use of the 'Advanced Search' query builder most useful. Find additional help articles on using advanced search here:

Select your Sources

Next, select the sources you'd like to monitor. 

You can also monitor a specific set of publications by unchecking all the categories, toggling to By Specific Domain, then entering in the domain (ex. NYtimes.com).

Tracking locations

Set Backfill Date Range

PeakMetrics is able to obtain historical data from news and blog sites. While some data for social media queries will exist historically, the availability of this data will be optimized moving forward from workspace creation.

To identify Narratives over a historic period of time, select a backfill date.

Workspace Status

Workspace status provides the current status of a Workspace and when it most recently identified new Narratives.  Possible statuses are:

  • Ready: You're ready to go!  The Workspaces is operating as expected and has identified Narratives.  This status will also show the last time the Workspace was updated.
  • Processing: Your Workspace is currently processing and identifying new Narratives.  It can take up to 12 hours to complete processing.
  • Paused: You have paused your Workspace so no new Narratives will be identified.  You can unpause your Workspace from the 3-dot menu.
  • Error: There was an issue with your Workspace that prevented PeakMetrics from successfully identifying Narratives. Sometime a Workspace will resolve itself, but if a Workspace has been in the Error state for more than 24 hours, contact customer support for help resolving the issue.
  • No Status: In rare instances, a Workspace may never update to show a status, but remain empty and display "no insights".  In this case there is typically an issue with the original Workspace query.  Please reach out to customer support for help.

Tips and Tricks

To generate high quality narratives from a workspace, we suggest you limit or create a search that generates more than 300 mentions per week and less than 7000 mentions per week. Note that translated results will not appear in the Example Mentions or Workspace Requirements guide.

Once you create a search, a list of example mentions will populate, and the estimated number of associated mentions will be displayed to show if these requirements have been met


Want to play around with a query and test the results before creating a Workspace?  Try setting up an alert first to review the mentions returned.

Need help?

Reach out to us at support@peakmetrics.com if you'd like some assistance with setting up or refining your queries to capture high quality Narratives!