Links of the week – back to school edition
As you may have noticed, last week the site was pretty much dead. For most of last week Beth and I were taking a road-trip along the East coast of Korea. We decided to drive South and stop at any cultural heritage sites that looked interested. It was a fantastic trip. Starting in September look for ivrytwr Summer Road-trip 2012; every Friday, a new video exploring a different Korean cultural heritage site will be uploaded. These videos will explore five interesting (and often bizarre) Korean cultural institutions – don’t miss it.
But now that summer vacation is over it’s time to go back to school and time to resume ivrytwr’s regular schedule. This week I’m going to (mostly) focus on links about visualizing data from Wikipedia.
1. Graphing the History of Philosophy – This post comes from the blog Drunks and Lampposts, a fantastic resource for a bunch of digital topics. This post offers step-by-step instructions for creating graphs using data from Wikipedia. As an example the post uses a graph showing how different philosophers influenced each other. The post is filled with useful tips and resources for visualizing networks of information. I’ve been following along and trying to create my own graph, but I’ve found that some of the steps aren’t as clear as they could be. Nevertheless, I’m going to solider on and I’ll post my results when they are finished.
2. The Graph of Ideas – Griff’s Graphs builds upon the above post to create a network visualization of everything on Wikipedia. Well, not quite everything – as the post notes, the graph only includes subjects on Wikipedia that include info-boxes containing “influenced” or “influenced by.” While the graph itself probably says more about Wikipedia itself than reality, it’s fascinating to see such a large-scale visualization. The post also includes more tips for visualizing Wikipedia data.
3. DBpedia – To quote the site’s “About” page, “DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web.” If you want to make visualizations like the those listed above, this site will be absolutely essential.
4. Gephi – Gephi is an open-source graphing application for Windows and OSX. It’s the application used to make the above graphs. I’ve recently downloaded it and am in the process of trying it out myself. I’ll write a post about Gephi after I’ve spent more time with it.
5. Teaching Students to Lie: historical methods through hoaxes – And now for something completely different. While this article doesn’t have anything to do with visualizing Wikipedia data, it’s the one article that’s really caught my eye this week. T. Mills Kelly has been teaching his students to become better historians by teaching them to lie. It may sound crazy, but there is a method to his madness. As part of his course students spend two weeks crafting a historical lie on the interent. If people try to debunk their lie, it’s the student’s job to try to lie his or her way out of it. Doing this teaching students two important things. First, it’s easy to lie on the internet. Second, historians must be skeptical about information and critical of where their sources are coming from. I think this is a brilliant idea for engaging students in history. I’d be interested to hear what other people think about this project.
Well that concludes another edition of links of the week. While I miss the freedom of my vacation, it’s nice to be back on the site again. As I mentioned at the top of the post, look out for ivrytwr Summer Road-trip 2012 where I posted a video of a different Korean cultural heritage site each Friday in September.
In other site news, look for a fairly busy week on the site. I have a number of posts planned for this week so stay tuned.
