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    Preliminary Thoughts on Visualising #opened09 #jiscssbr

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    This was written about visualising the opened09 Open Education conference. But it is more widely useful as an exploration of the affordances of visualisation generally as an aid to understanding. In the Institutional innovation programme I am trying to understand the basic questions underlying visualisation of the programme: people, projects, technologies, themes and how they link. Even before you ask the question, "what does it mean" you have to ask more fundamental questions. In observing that Twitter networks were interesting Tony Hirst first did a manual filter of frequency of posts over time. What are the first questions that give shape to the Institutional Innovation visualisation?

    • 13 August 2009
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    over 2 years ago Tony Hirst responded:
    "first did a manual filter of frequency of posts over time"

    A couple of reasons for that...being a very of very little brain and programming ability, I was grabbing tweets from the twitter search using a yahoo pips concoction; there is a limit to pulling back 100 tweets per search, and only constructed a pipe that could pull back the most recent 500 search hits on the conference hashtag.

    Another reason for the limiting is the hourly limit on calls to the twitter API - so in pulling back friends lists, I couldn't grab more than 150 per hour; and i couldn't be bothered to write a script that polled the api over a period of time that meant i didn't get limited.

    Thirdly, graphviz doesn't seem to like plotting graphs with 10s of thousands of edges (at least, not on my machine); I haven't yet got to grips with any tools that do, and not sur how useful they are for generating images you can try to read in any sensible way either?

    Fourthly, the images were generated as a foil to help me shape questions about what sort of information/utility there may be in analysing hashtag twitter networks, and then use those questions to hlp guide my reading of more formal social network analysis techniqus (eg can I, by eye, see interesting things in the graph that SNA tools might be able to pull out and report on automatically?)

    Fifthly, I'm hacking this in spare time, coffee breaks and midnight hours, rather than doing it as part of an extended, funded JISC project.... ;-)

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