Tag Archives: Visualization

Qwiki: awesome animations of Wikipedia pages

Some time ago I made a video of evolution in time of the Wikipedia page about 2005 London bombings.
Well, what you get from Qwiki, for almost every Wikipedia page, has nothing to do with it! It is awesome! Below there is the embedding of the qwiking of page about 2005 London bombings.

View 7 July 2005 London bombings and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Qwiki gets info from a Wikipedia page and automatically reads a text summary (synchronise with the text), adding images from different sources.
It is amazing! I can imagine students in schools pondering “instead of listening this boring professor about history of Europe, I’ll check the qwiking of it” (see below).

View History of Europe

Or do you want to quickly get an idea about the recent 2011 Egyptian revolution? Nothing better than qwiking it (see below).

View 2011 Egyptian revolution and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Well, you can compare these videos with the reports created by professional journalists of CNN or BBC and pondering how far we are from automatic generation in real-time of news reports.
Currently most videos are short (even when the corresponding pages are very long) and this totally makes sense from Qwiki perspective but I guess we are not far away from automatic generation of school lessons about geography, history or literature (and more). For example check the qwiking of the Trento, the city where I live and work.

View Trento and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

And as an early feedbacker was saying, I’m nearly in tears. This is so beautiful.

Wikipedia mentioned in books in 1975

UPDATE: Dami, in a comment to this post, says “if a word appears in a newer edition of an older work (e.g. in the introduction section of cheap reprints of public domain books) Google will count it as an appearance at the time the original work was published.” I checked and this is true, thanks Dami!

I was playing with Google Books Ngram Viewer, which allows you to check how frequently certain phrases occurred in books published since 1950 up to 2008.
Curiously the following graph reports that some books (only 0.0000011% but greater than zero anyway!) were containing the work “wikipedia” (and “wiki”) already in 1950 and in 1975. Maybe there is a small bug even in mighty google services?

The following graph instead shows the increase (as expected) of mentions to “wikipedia” and “wiki” in books since 2003.

Beautiful visualization of Wikipedia discussions on article deletions


straight AfD sample

s-shaped AfD sample


spiral-like AfD sample

At notabilia.net, Dario Taraborelli, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Moritz Stefaner put together a neat visualization of the 100 longest Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions. Each time a user joins an AfD discussion and recommends to keep, merge, or redirect the article a green segment leaning towards the left is added. Each time a user recommends to delete the article a red segment leaning towards the right is added.

Edits of Feminism in Wikipedia in time

Top 50 Editors in Feminism articles in Wikipedia and their editing patterns visualized in time (from 2002 up to 2009).

The image is from “The Feminist Critique: Mapping Controversy on Wikipedia” (pdf), a report prepared by Morgan Currie for the new media masters program at the University of Amsterdam. The document is 49 pages but don’t be afraid: it is very interesting and the last 20 pages or so are just a copy and paste of raw data and tables used for the report.
The image embedded above is just one of the many thought-provoking images and graphs.
All the scripts used for producing the report and the graphs are available as free software thanks to Papyromancer who wrote the software and released it on github. Great!

Amazing visualizations of activity on Wikis

Warning: this webpage loads many processor-intensive animations. It might break your browser and probably you will have to close browser window (tab) after use.

The first visualization is made by Erik Zachte and available at stats.wikimedia.org.
The animation (embedded below) shows 4 aspects of the development of different Wikipedias in different languages (en, it, fr, …): X-axis: Age of a project, Y-axis: Number of articles per project, Circle size: Number of editors per project, Color: Maturity of content (blue=mostly stubs, violet=mostly larger articles)

Interactive version, all projects (requires Firefox 3+, Safari 4+ or Chrome)

Static version, Wikipedia only (8 Mb Flash)

The other 3 visualisations are made by Matt Ryal with JavaScript (Processing.js and RaphaëlJs). They are about activity on wiki and blogs of Atlassian’s Extranet.
I embed them here but you can check Matt’s post for more details and better visualization.

Activity — a rippling visualisation of comment activity on the wiki. Based loosely on the Apple Arabesque screensaver.

Comments — a falling bar-graph visualisation of comments by blogpost. Based very much on a Flash visualisation by Digg, but reimplemented in JS (this is about blog and not wiki).

Contributors — a tree graph visualisation linking commenters and blog post authors. (this is about blog and not wiki)

Facebook social network analysis using Gephi

This great presentation tells you:
* how to use Netvizz, a Facebook application for exporting your Facebook social network or the network of a Facebook group in the form of a .gdf file
* and then how to import the .gdf file into gephi for analyzing and visualizing your network: you can select and parameter layout algorithms, change colors and sizes, etc.
Amazing!

Terrific GapMinder talk: preconcepts and myth about development, visualized!

I highly recommend you to watch the presentation Hans Rosling gave at TED. It is inspiring and passionate, funny and moving, it is the kind of presentation I would like to be able to give, one day. I suggest you to download the file (zipped MP4) and watch it full screen (I did it already at least 5 times!) or just click on the play button here below.

Rosling is founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. In this presentation, with the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. [Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:34] (from TED blog).
If you want to create yourself graphs like the ones you saw in the video, you can do it with the GapMinder tool (hosted by Google). Explore the data and find even more preconcepts you hold.
[via bruno [via ethan]]