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The purpose of this analysis is to analyse three types of heterogenous network data found in one single policy paper called the Green Paper on Citizen Science, written by the Socientize project, which is funded by the EC. In this report the following types of data will be analysed:
This way, the network of each policy paper (in this case the Green Paper on Citizen Science) could perhaps be mapped. Then, the following questions can be asked:
The challenge is, however, to find ways of merging and visualizing very different kinds of network nodes. For example, scientific literature is very rich on meta-data that shows several different qualities of networks. So do URLs that can be crawled throughout the internet. But books, printed reports and journals outside the indexed webs of science are poor in metadata. Thus, some experimentation is required.
Note: this is just a page for work-in-progress. Every line of analysis is highly tentative and in constant flight.
This map was created using VosViewer to find out what journals the Green Paper cites (indirectly, as cited references of the 21 articles).
This map was also created in VosViewer to find the central authors.
This visualization shows the Cited References network of the 21 articles found in the Green Paper, visualized using Gephi. The size of the nodes is based on Cited References in the local dataset (see list here). Articles that have less than 2 local citations have been excluded for the purpose of clarity.
Except for Irwin, the other large nodes represent ecology researchers.
This map was also created using Gephi. It is based on the keywords of the 21 articles.
The trend of ecology is very much present here.
In the entire Green Paper Document there are 25 URLs. These were crawled with Issuecrawler and Navicrawler and then exported to Gephi.
This visualisation primarily shows that the Green paper document is very EU-centric. This is of course no surprise as an isolated observation. However, when looking at the various links, there seem to be an interesting intertwinement of NGOs/Lobby groups and specific (funding) agencies in the EU.
The same 25 URLs found in the Green Paper were processed in Issuecrawler. Similar, but not identical results were obtained.
Issuecrawler has a deeper crawl and it reveals further networks. The primary Eu institutions are clearly clustered together on both maps. But also the national government institutions appear. The network also ties in the various framework programme projects of the EU. US projects, such as birds.cornell.edu and the American universities (Berkeley, Stanford) are in the network periphery.
The same 25 URLs were processed using the Hyphe Software by Médialab. The pages were crawled and I manually excluded some of the big social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, for the sake of clarity. Hyphe is less blackboxed than IssueCrawler, and it is thus possible to make decisions across the whole network, not just the “core network” that IssueCrawler lets you download. This way, the dataset is much more flexible and allows for a greater zoom.
You can produce your own visuals with the following files:
Note: This is just a zoom on one of the nodes. The entire network must be viewed as a pdf-file.
Here, we see the Socientize web page. It is very easy to see what pages Socientize links to, and what pages it receives links from.
This image is produced from the same large network as above. Here we can zoom in on two important blogs that are linked from the Green Paper. Carencooper.com and NYecology have two links in common (besides being linked from the same Green Paper): scienceonline.com and birds.cornell.edu.
(not yet started)
