Tagclouds have value, but, as I’ve written before, they’ve a number of shortfalls as well. I’ve just finished my attempt to remedy some of these problems: FeedVis. It’s an animated tagcloud that lets you compare word frequencies accross different time periods and authors, then check out the posts that used the words. The demo is using the feeds for Scott McLeod’s Technorati-compiled list of top 50 edublogs, since that’s what got me started about feeds and tagclouds in the first place (although the program will work with any set of feeds). More details about how it works are on the demo page.
I think what I’m really most excited about is the way this uses animation to let you actually see the words changing from one sample to the next. Motion is such an important part of the way we see the world, and it’s been underemployed in information visualization, I think (although this changing; Hans Rosling’s TED talks have gotten a lot of buzz, for instance).
The project has been really fun, and a great learning experience; it’s gotten me really pumped about inofVis for learning about online interaction. I think there is a lot of potential there for ed tech research. I’m also pretty excited about programming; I started learning in February (with php), and then started javascript a couple months ago. It’s been a really mind-expanding experience, and I’m looking foward to my next project, probably once I get done with grad school apps.
8 Comments
Hi, this is wonderful, I only came across it today – it is a really clean visualisation. I’ll be returning to it !
All the best with the programming too – this is pretty amazing considering how long you’ve been learning – congratulations,
Nicola
Thanks, Nicola! Making it clean and usable was definitely a priority for the project, so I’m glad to hear that you got that feel.
Jason, really nicely implemented! Something that I (personally) would like to see is the ability to filter “edu-stopwords” (e.g. those like “education” or “learning” to see themes in a bit more fine-grained way.
Great view!
I try to get this running for Dutch edublogs, but can’t get it to work.
Does the cache directory need writing permissions?
@Lilia, thanks! You’ve got a good idea there; I spent quite some time trying to decide on which words should be stopwords and which shouldn’t; I ultimately went with the shorter list. Why not just let the user decide?
If you run the program on your own server, it’s easy to edit the stopword list, but I think you’re right that end-users should be able to do it, too. Shouldn’t be too hard to add…look for it in the next release.
@Willem, I’ve got two suggestions:
First, check the path to your cache in frontend/cache_locations.php; you may need to use absolute (like “/home/yourname/public_html” etc) rather than relative paths. You might also just double-check to make sure you didn’t include a typo or something.
Second, as you suggest, it may have to do with the way permissions on your server are set up. AFAIK, your best bet there is to contact your administrator. I’ll look into it and see if I can’t find another solution, though.
If you still have trouble, feel free to send me your opml, and I can run it on my server while you figure it out.
Thanks for FeedVis. It got lots of attention on the web and seems also having a lot of potential. I ave tried on my own machine but I can not get any of the results I want, not event see the demo post because I can’t go back in time and the post of the tags are so old that they not get listed properly. Trying to upload my own opml didn’t work either (I don’t know why).
We try even to understand the code (I’m not a programmer but I have a friend who makes php) and your notice about trying to refactor it and seeing the mess and not having the time makes me thing if there is any way to keep the good ideas of FeedVis rolling, may be even with your small time. Perhaps a mailing list or group could work.
Thanks for the good ideas and preliminar work and sharing your learning and keep the feedback even with the small amount of time.
Cheers,
Offray
Offray, thanks for your comments, and my apologies for not getting back to you sooner; I’ve been overseas and had very limited internet access.
Sorry that you’ve had trouble getting FeedVis to run on your server. If you email me with the specifics of your problem, I’m reckon we can get it solved; so far most people have been successful after we tried a few things.
As for a mailing list or group around FeedVis, you’re more than welcome to get something like that started. I’m afraid getting starting here at UNC is taking 110% of my time right now.
Thanks again for the kind words and encouragement. It’s great living in a time and place where even a novice programmer like me can make something that folks find interesting. The Internets: it’s gonna be big.