Public Lab Research note


First draft of tag graph

by liz , bsugar | September 15, 2016 18:23 15 Sep 18:23 | #13449 | #13449

@bsugar used Gephi to make this tag graph of the top 256 tags used on PublicLab.org.

  • If there are 10 or more co-occurrences of pairs of tags, they get a line drawn between them; the thicker the line, the more co-occurrences.
  • Different colors indicate closely associated tags, referred to as "communities". There are ~15 "communities" shown here. Benjamin tested a range of numbers, this was the best fit as a first draft.

Screen_Shot_2016-09-15_at_2.14.24_PM.png

plots_tag_graph_256_filtered.pdf


2 Comments

@bsugar here...I should add...despite being very aesthetically pleasing, this graph was created to help answer the questions "How many posts are tool related?" and "Which tools are being worked upon/employed where?". There are two issues with answering these seemingly simple questions: 1) since there aren't any standard tags in a folksonomy, it's not gauranteed that picking up all folks with the tag "spectrometry" (for example) will be inclusive of all posts that are actually about that. 2) we don't know of all projects happening in all geographical areas. 3) We have over 6000 unique tags on the site. So the idea here was to create a graph of tag co-occurrences and then analyze them as though there were communities of tags. Take a look at the bright orange cluster on the right which has a lot to do with air quality, and also contains the tag with the location of Wisconsin.

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This looks like a really good result that answers a lot of your original questions. I guess most people don't tag their notes with a location, so there is only a partial answer to the location question.

tagboolean.jpg

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