Wednesday, 7 July 2004
this is my brain on extisp.icio.us
Kevan Davis has written a program that takes your del.icio.us tags and creates a visualization—items with more links are larger. I’m not entirely sure how the positioning works, but I suspect that tags that often appear together on an item are located closer together.
Pretty amazing. Such a simple idea, so elegantly implemented, and so remarkably accurate at mapping my cognitive space. (Click on the above image to get to the real-time version, which allows you to click on any of the tags in the image and go directly to my list of links in that category.)
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Excerpt: wThe 10 ten words of the year according to Merriam-Webster, based on lookups: with del.icio.us and Flickr tags. Also links to currently blank wiki pages and Wikipedia articles. 1. blog: del, flickr, wiki, pedia2. incumbent: del, flickr, wiki, ped...
Excerpt: The 10 ten words of the year according to Merriam-Webster, based on lookups: with del.icio.us and Flickr tags. Also links to currently blank wiki pages and Wikipedia articles. 1. blog: del, flickr, wiki, pedia 2. incumbent: del, flickr, wiki, ped...
that flickr daily zeitgeist thing is covering up your weblog entries
yes, there is a flickr daily zeitgeist box appearing over the text of this blog entry... i'm using firefox 0.91
Oops. Sorry. Should have tested in more places. I've taken it out for now, pending a larger-scale redesign.
Liz,
Just raising a little question about the characterization of the visualization as "remarkably accurate at mapping my cognitive space". There are other mappings producable. That is there is more to your cognitive space than is recoverable from the explicitly tagged elements of your blog space. For instance, a different picture could be generated by frequency listing based on regular pattern matching of names. And then that constellation of names could be crossed with the del.icio.us visualization. This might provide a picture of a set of meme carriers and if the data is captured in time segments, researchers might be able to track the play of meme carriers -- what they drop into a given cognitive space and what they pick up from that space.
I am arguing for a distinction between a representation of one aspect of a cognitive space and the cognitive space itself (that there in the notion of mapping). And pleading that cognitive space not be reduced to the sample space bounded by explicit markers (accuracy of the weighted markers is not the same as accuracy of a mapping of the cognitive space).
I hope this makes some kind of sense.
The positioning is entirely random, for what it's worth. (Apart from a few lazy tweaks to try to stop similarly-sized words from overlapping one another.)
Kevan, thanks for commenting. Yes, I'd realized that the positioning was random when reloading the page generated different results.
It's still extremely cool. :)
VISUALISATION
This comment stream istoo far too complicated for my simple mind.
What I want is a mind map (spider chart) linking my weblog (positioned in the centre) to all the links I have made on my site (and my other sites which might be highlighted in my chosen colour). This would delimit some of my "cognitive space" or, really, indicate my "cognitive style".
By seeing where my links lead to
(1) can see how I arrived at particulat train of thought
(2) where I might have picked up ideas from
(3) enable me to go back to a particular place in the "cognitive chain"
Currently I make notes on paper or go back to my history to see what "cognitive terrain" I travelled on any one day. In the early days, I used to make a mind map of daily visits, with annotation to say whether I thought particular ones were worth a re-visit. Too laborious and time consumimg, except if it appeared I was onto a "good link day" for a particular topic (as opposed to a bad hair day?). This would be automated by the spider-chart software. There would be a spider chart link for anyone who wanted to go from my site to see my links.
As I added more links more lines would appear on my chart. Statistics could be gathered from this, later,etc.
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