I made a small video using data from the Edgeryders platform. The nodes represent posts, radiating from topics, in turn radiating from subcategories (the different national fora and the workspace). Participants are represented as pawns who “beam” the conversation and create new nodes when they post. It’s made with Gource – I had to write a script that converts Edgeryders data in a format digestible by Gource.
It’s a nice way to capture how the conversation developed. You can clearly see how the different fora in the various language germinate, develop, slow down, then suddenly speed up again (in the Fall of 2019, when the outreach effort intensified). The community fora are shown in blue, the consortium’s online workspace in gray, the POPREBEL-relevant discussion on Campfire in red, same as on this platform. Yellow nodes are not posts, but ethnographic annotations.
So, there are two things we might want to do it here, and here I ask for your help.
First (mainly for @noemi), it would be interesting to check whether we can visually detect interesting phenomena. For example, a successful event results in a “blooming”; or a particularly interesting post generates a lot of replies; or people participating to more than one forum vs. staying in only one.
There is also an interpretation for the clusters of yellow nodes: they point to semantically dense posts. If one post has 20 annotations, the software visualizes this as a “ball” of 20 yellow nodes connected to one single blue node. Looking at the whole conversation, one can see if the meaning is evenly distributed or not.
EDIT: after the work explained here, the text below has become outdated. Please ignore.
And second, even with one day compressed in 0.1 seconds, this is still a very long video, over 8 minutes. I do not dare to speed it up much more, the software’s default setting is 10x slower, and at high speeds you might lose the sense of what is going on. Any ideas? Should we maybe only take a few clips, or something? @Jan, @Richard, @Silvia_Gigli, any thought of how we could use this for communication/websites? The original resolution is much better than what went on YouTube.