Keywords Visualization v2

See the live visualization at: http://www.bengfort.com/keywords/

Version 2 of the Bengfort.com Keywords Visualization is now complete. This new update includes tool tips (hover the mouse over a node and the tool tip appears) that describe the data in plain language- in this case, how many times the keyword appears in Bengfort.com (note that multiple appearances in a single post are all counted, as opposed to the number of posts that include the keyword, I hope my grammar was clear enough to explicate this). In addition, now the strength of the links is now visually shown via color and thickness. This actually expanded the graph, so I may have to refactor so it all fits on the screen. Finally, if you click on a node, it searches Bengfort.com for the last 7 posts that include the keyword and present those posts to you!

Additionally, the graph has now been made clearer. Link strength is identified on a 5 point scale, however I have excluded strengths of 1 or 2, this immensely cleans up the graph and only shows the most relevant links. While this means some links no longer appear, other connections have suddenly become more apparent. (I’m especially fond of the link between our disciplines and technology!)

This version finalizes the tutorial on SitePoint.com with modifications made to make it work for Bengfort.com. I know this graph is still far from perfect, and I intend to continue to explore making this application more usable. To that end, any feedback from you guys would be much appreciated! For instance, tell me what you see, and if there is anything I could do to make it better. (Remember, I don’t know what you see, I only see what is on my browser). If there is any functionality you think should be included, if there are any keywords you want added, please let me know! I know that it is easy to read the post and to forget about it, but the more you think about it, the better I can make it!

Once again, the link to the visualization is: http://www.bengfort.com/keywords/ check it out!

Data visualization of frequence of Bengfort.com keywords

See the live visualization and play with the Spring-Graph structure at: http://www.bengfort.com/keywords/

I’m constantly amazed about how people can manipulate data and statistics any way they see fit to make their own point. I don’t know about you, but whenever someone gives me the “numbers” I’m very skeptical of where they came from. Just consider the fodder from our so called major news networks that John Stewart has to make fun of! I think I’m right in saying that people are all too willing to believe “numbers” just because they look science-y or there is a pretty bar graph. Even simple inspection will reveal flaws- percentages that don’t add up to 100 or whose summation far exceeds 100. Graphs that use highlighting and weighted fonts that don’t necessarily apply to a distribution, or the simple omission of keys (legends) that would prove an opposite point.

That’s why the science (and art) of data visualization so appeals to me. We have learned bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts since we were in elementary school, but these are the tools that are so often used to mislead us: simply because they are too simple to hold the complex data that we are now used to analyzing on a daily basis. Data visualization attempts to take complex data sets and graphically represent them in a way that humans can instantly comprehend their meaning. Visual cues including size, color, shape, and difference are all used to represent some form of data. With the growth of web technologies and web databases, an ever increasing number of amazing and interesting data visualizations has appeared, and soon I believe that elementary school kids will be taught even more complex data structures.

So, when I got a tweet from Sitepoint.com concerning building a keyword visualizer with Flex- I knew that this would be perfect for our website. So I read the article and built a version of what they used for our website! (Note that at this point, I’m still awaiting the third part of this three part series, and then I will continue to make my own customizations, so stay tuned for more updates with the visualization!) Essentially what is happening is that a script goes through our blog database and picks out keywords in all the posts. Keywords that appear in the same post are considered linked. For instance, by writing science and technology in this post together, those two words will now have a link between them. In addition the script counts the occurrences of the keyword as well as the occurrences of the links. (If you’re keeping score- this is a server side PHP script that outputs the results in a JSON file format).

The visualization is handled by Adobe’s Flex framework combined with the SpringGraph API. The more a keyword appears, the larger its nodes will be- in addition, the higher the count of links between keywords, the larger the link will be. Distance is also a factor- the larger keywords are on the outside, with the lesser keywords on the inside- they “repulse” each other by the strength of their links. Now, by simple inspection we can see that Guyana linked with Recipes and Cookbook- is by far the largest part of our website. Benjamin is connected to China and Ballet (don’t know why) while cat and dog are so closely connected that they are almost touching! You can see how this provides basically a topical analysis of our blog!

I know you guys may not find this particularly interesting, but I hope you can grasp how much data has been distilled into an easily viewable graph- we have over 600 posts in our blog, each with about 700 words in them- all distilled into an easily comprehensible visual medium. As our blog changes, so will the graph. I think that in all our fields- International Relations, Political Science, Anthropology, Business, International Education, and Computer Science- this is extremely relevant, and I hope that you guys will make use of the tools that I have shown you. (speaking of those fields, I should probably add them as key words!). If you are interested in doing any sort of complex visualization- trust me, I’m your guy to develop an application for you that will do it!

See the live visualization and play with the Spring-Graph structure at: http://www.bengfort.com/keywords/

This is not so dramatic as it seems- the software is installed on our server and is very customizable, and I have started customizing it already adding plugins and even writing my own add-ins to the site. There are some downsides, which I will discuss in a second, but the interface is better designed, you can upload pictures, user management is improved- as well as security which is huge! You can comment and participate in the blog now, and everything is fully functioning- the software I had wrote had some gaps that I kept intending to fix, but just never got around to it.

Hopefully you guys can embrace change as we move forward. I still have your old blogs archived, and I will work on re-posting them to the site so that you can have them documented. However you will note some overall structural changes to the site that are necessary because of the software. For instance, we all blog on the same page- there is no separation by author. This might cause you some concern, but hopefully we can all collaborate together to generate awesome content! I will post some recipes, so they will appear as their own post rather than as a page. And some of the other applications, like the photo albums application isn’t available- and we’ll have to use tools like Flickr to share our photos.

Using this software may take some learning, and if you need any help getting around the interface or with blogging on the site in general, please let me know and I would be glad to help! If you are a user of the Bengfort.com site, then please register as a subscriber- this will mean that I don’t have to moderate your comments. Users from the old site are already on here- so you guys should update your profiles! And everyone should be blogging! Enjoy!

Here is the deal: everyone in our family uses the Internet from everything to getting directions on Google maps to online grocery shopping, to instant communications, to sharing pictures. We even have a dedicated server all to our own family! The Internet is such an ingrained thing in our lives, yet we treat it as a mysterious thing that we can only know the surface of, even if we are perfectly content to have it as an necessary part of our lives.

I see a strong parallel to cars. Cars are so ingrained in American culture that 15 year olds own them- and really it is their first major purchase. From 15, we eat, drink, live, even sleep in our cars (and possibly other nocturnal activities!), and spend close to 5% of our day (1.2 hours) in them! (I spend close to 17% of my day in the car…). Yet only a select few Americans spend anytime building cars, or designing them. However, all Americans do know some very important things about cars:

1. The basics of internal combustion
2. How to change their oil
3. How to fill their tires, and check them
4. What technologies they want need to buy for better performance

We should treat our knowledge of the Internet the same way! We should know the basics of client server relationships (internal combustion), we should know how to change our il (write HTML), we should know how to check and fill our tires (formatting with CSS), and we should know what technologies we want when we need better performance (JavaScript, PHP, ASP, MySQL, etc). This basic overview will give us a better Internet experience, just like the car knowledge gives us a better driving experience.

To that end, and for the class, I wrote an introductory survey to Web Development, its only 10 pages long, but I wrote it with you guys (my family) in mind! I would highly encourage you to read it and respond with comments to me! Also, check the links in the appendix of the document for further tutorials.

The survey can be found here:
[Link to be updated soon]