Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Is anyone using IssueCrawler?

Its a system that compiles aggregate data about a particular issue into a form which can be easily visualised – so, say you were searching for information about the WTC attacks on Sept11th it would give you a (logical) map of how a number of sites link together allowing you to understand the structure of the information available on the web about that issue. The maps are SVG maps which took me a little while to get working in Firefox, and even now they’re a bit odd, but the kind of information you can get out of it looks good. It takes a while to collect this kind of information so they cache the crawls they’ve done before – you can browse the archive of other peoples crawls to see the sorts of things that are covered.

Login is required and they’ll ask for some information to go with that – but if you’re interested in visualising connections between information about issues of interst to you it is probably worthwhile.


Categories: Memories.

/ 2 Comments

2 comments

  1. strange_complex

    Wow. I don’t really have time to check this out now, as I’m supposed to be writing a lecture, but it sounds brilliant. I think we’re all aware of the nature of the web as a vast network of nodes and pathways, but how cool to be able to ‘see’ one section of that. I’ll definitely have a proper look later.

    Reply
    • neilh

      You can’t see much without a login – its run by govcom.org and theres a little more info at IssueNetwork. Shame they don’t show off some of their archive results without login.

      But, yes, very much the direction I’ve been hoping things would go – the tools for visualising the connectedness of the net have been far slower coming than I had hoped, this is a good example of the kinds of things that are possible, but its still got a way to go by looks of things – at least these maps are SVG so they should be useable from a number of applications, and they have CSV representations available too.

      Reply

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