I’m more interested in seeing what’s going on right now and seeing how these topics are related. Since this is a graph visualization exercize I threw graphviz at the problem. After a bit of preliminary experimentation I ended up defining a graph based on recent tags pulled from an RSS feed. Each tag is represented as a node and any tags which appear together on the same post have arcs between them. Tag text gets scaled up a little with frequency. The effect isn’t perfect. Its pretty boring when there isn’t much data like on this site:
With a bit more data, like from my recent delicious feed things can get cluttered but we can see what I’m interested in right now:
This idea isn’t fully developed. The complexity of laying these graphs out in a sensible manner increases pretty rapidly as the number of nodes and arcs increases and so does the visual clutter. I’d like to experiment with client-side graph layout (ie: implementing graphviz in JavaScript) and doing something more sensible with synonym tags - ie: tags which always appear together. Synonym tags are somewhat interesting, but can distract from the relationships between concepts. Treating all tags that are coincident over a small number of posts as synonyms may often result in false synonyms, and collapsing synonyms will make it easier to scale to more posts, so I expect that that may be a productive path to go down in scaling these visualizations up to encompass more posts.
Oh, and the final demonstration - my friend Dan is looking for and apartment and is a Ruby on Rails web application developer:
4 Comments
Any chance you might share this code? Your idea is fascinating, and although I’ve never worked with Graphviz, I would like to experiment with writing RSS fed graphs this way - could you share the specific code you used in Graphviz to produce the graphs you displayed in your post?
I worked on something like this Back when Firefox 1.5 was just about to be released, there was an “Extend Firefox” contest. I worked on an extension that used SVG to draw graphs somewhat like these. I stopped working on it because I never got my code to perform well and the contest deadline came and went. I would be willing to share my code and perhaps revive the project if you are interested. Contact me if you want to discuss, I will have to dig up the code and dust it off, I think I can make a demo version that loads as a normal html page in Firefox.
For extra credit… If you have the spare time on your hands, why not make a rendering engine which will do a graphviz-type layout in GWT-friendly Java, then use GWT to turn it into JavaScript… perhaps more easy to add features like dragging nodes around, pan and zoom.
people people are stranger