mailman exploration tool project (and an air-l network visualization)
Hello, I'm currently preparing classes for the new semester and one of the things I'll do with my students (multimedia) is working on digital methods and the visualization of large amounts of data. One of the things we're going to work on is a tool for exploring mailman archives (they're pretty much standard and easy to parse) and I would like to know whether anybody has an ongoing research project on (a) mailinglist(s) and some data we could play with. I've written some quick code and here (http://software.rieder.fr/stuff/airl_undirected.png) you'll find a visualization of the air-l archives (22K mails, 3K posters) that shows a social graph where replying to a mail constitutes a relation (min 2 interactions, link strength taken into account). Only posters with 10+ mails taken into account. Node size is no of posts, node color is degree. A working toolkit should provide basic statistical/topological analysis, statistical exploration of word frequencies, topic clustering, data export, anonymization, and a way to visualize network structures over time. This stuff needs some serious domain knowledge to be even remotely interesting (beyond the "look it's a map") and I'd love to work with somebody who has an actual research project and wouldn't mind giving occasional feedback. best, B. -- Bernhard Rieder Laboratoire Paragraphe Université de Paris VIII bernhard.rieder@univ-paris8.fr http://bernhard.rieder.fr http://thepoliticsofsystems.net
Interesting graph, my two observations are.... this doesn't include the first few years of air-l and any of air-meet and those would likely be revealing, but i don't think we have the data for those anymore, i might somewhere, but i might not. also, since the policy change on the reply-to, i've basically cut my reply's by what feels like 90%, so there should be a marked difference between the my work on he list from the earlier years and now, and also now i post from two different addresses. in fact, your graph might be an interesting tool to argue that air-l should go back to proper list settings instead of the current ones, but i've given up on that argument. -- jeremy hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. -Pablo Picasso
Hear hear on restoring the proper Reply settings Denise N. Rall, PhD. Special Projects, Faculty of Arts & Science Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW AUSTRALIA Mobile +(61)(0)438 233344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ --- On Sat, 2/10/10, Jeremy hunsinger <jeremy@tmttlt.com> wrote:
From: Jeremy hunsinger <jeremy@tmttlt.com> Subject: Re: [Air-L] mailman exploration tool project (and an air-l network visualization) To: "Bernhard Rieder" <lists@procspace.net> Cc: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Received: Saturday, 2 October, 2010, 9:26 PM
participants (3)
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Bernhard Rieder -
Denise N. Rall -
Jeremy hunsinger