June 17, 2008
Trackback Graphs and Blog Categories
Okay, another take on the Digital Worlds uncourse blog trackback graph... To what extent do the emergent structures "respect" my use of blog categories (which have RSS feeds associated with them, and so are automatically published as discrete linear lists in their own right?)
I'm not sure I've found the best way of visualising this yet, but i have sort of found a way. In particular, for each post, display the title of the post, followd by the categories it is tagged with:
So what's the point? Err, well, err, this view is to help explore in an informal way the extent to which the implicit structure that arises from back references/trackbacks corresponds to the 'explicit' structuring imposed on posts by the author as a resulting of associating posts with a particular category. In some cases, there is pretty good match, where the implicit/emergent structure matches the explicit category structure:
In other cases, it's a bit more complex?
(Maybe I need to use colour to make the tags more explicit somehow? But how best to do it? (and how in techie detail to actually do it?!))
So I guess this opens up questions along the lines of "to what extent do implicit, emergent (trackback) and explicit (category) structures match one another?" Or maybe, "in which posts do trackback and category structures fork, and what is the pedagogical role of those posts?" Or maybe it doesn't - I have no idea! (Can you tell I'm making this up as I go along?!;-)
Next up, I think I'll have a go at constructing an uncourse blog adjacency matrix (for N posts, size N x N. A link from post i to post j gives element a_i,j = 1) and maybe the uncourse blog Laplacian matrix. Not sure why, what it will say, or hat it may or may not be good for, but it seems like the obvious next step?
Tags: digitalworlds, structure, course graph
Posted by ajh59 at June 17, 2008 10:52 AM