If you’ve read any of my previous posts you know [...] [Read more...]

What does a tweet sound like? Not the kind that flies around in the air, but the kind that zips to and from our mobile devices. I’m intensely interested in finding ways to make sense of data. Sonification of data – representing data with sound – offers one way to do ... [Read more...]

As a researcher interested in information flows in digital environments I’m often interested in finding patterns in social trace data. For this discussion we can think of digital social trace data as the text that people post into threaded topics on forums, like on Reddit or a Wiki Talk ... [Read more...]

Gaston Sanchez’s post on R-Bloggers inspired me to waste a bit of time. He wanted to replicate the Google Charts widget to make gauges. I modified his code (below) in some minor ways and made a function out of it so you can alter the look and feel of ... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago Bob wrote about a post about a research note that was recently accepted to the iConference. In it we outline the beginnings of a research project where we look at the interaction of different media platforms (Twitter and Blogs) with more traditional sources. In this ... [Read more...]

The animation embedded in this post was done using R and the iGraph package and was, frankly, a great deal more work than I thought it would be when I started. What kept me going was a desire to express a wish for the New Year while also experimenting with ... [Read more...]

This article lists the steps I take to create a network animation in R, provides some example source code that you can copy and modify for your own work, and starts a discussion about programming and visualization as an interpretive approach in research. Before I start, take a look at ... [Read more...]

Data visualizations are useful for exploratory work and as an aid in communicating findings. Data visualizations also seem to be in demand these days as a kind of eye candy for capturing attention. But when we look at one engaging enough to hold our attention, we want to know what ... [Read more...]

This is a Twitter retweet network. When people tweet, they may get retweeted by other people, repeating the message for their followers to view. Each retweet is a one-way flow of information that links the first person to each person who retweeted them (forwarded the original tweet into their own ... [Read more...]

  Since October we have been collecting tweets related to the Occupy movement and so far we’ve picked up 64,298,104 tweets. In future posts we will give you some insight into our process, but today the question is, what is the difference between new style retweets, old style retweets and new ... [Read more...]

Wikipedia talk pages allow editors to discuss the evolving content on related Wikipedia articles. Sometimes the topic of a page is controversial and the talk page threads can become heated with different posts invoking a wide range of values in the kinds of appeals they use in their arguments. For ... [Read more...]