Digging Deep for Hidden Information in the Web Part 1: Automated blog analysis Part 2: Automated...
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Transcript of Digging Deep for Hidden Information in the Web Part 1: Automated blog analysis Part 2: Automated...
Digging Deep for Hidden Information in the Web
Part 1: Automated blog analysisPart 2: Automated hyperlink analysis
Part 1 Automated Blog Analysis
Analysing Public Science Debates through Blogs and Online News Sources
Part 1 Contents
Background Blogs Online news sources RSS
Tracking public science debatesDetecting public science debates
Background
There are millions of bloggersBloggers are almost normal human beingsAutomatically tracking bloggers’ postings may give insights into public opinion
Blog tracking companies
IBM WebFountain
Intelliseek BlogPulse “Monitor, measure and leverage
consumer-generated media”
Others growing…
RSS Format
Rich Site Syndication/Really Simple Syndication XML technology Used for frequently updated information
sources (blogs, news, academic journals)
RSS Readers Users subscribe to the RSS feeds of
favourite blogs/sites/journals/searches Notified when updates available User-controlled ‘push’ technology
Blog keyword searches
Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for links” Stem cell research
Blogdigger stem cell research
IceRocket Allows Advanced searches Allows genuine date range search (Google only
allows “last updated” date range searches)
Track evolution over time
What is changing about interest in Stem cell research/GM food?Are experts good at identifying changes in public interest?How can experts be sure/can they be supported with quantitative information?Can blogs be used to generate time series reflecting changes in “public interest”?
Free science debate graphs
Solves the trend identification problem?Blogpulse Offers free automatic blog searches and keyword-generated click-search graphs Stem cell research GM food Mobile phone radiation
How to detect a new debate?
Heuristic methods E.g. Read papers, scan relevant blogs
Automatic methods E.g. look for sudden increase in usage
of science-related words in blogs?
Free hot topic searches
Blog keyword search (sort by date) Technorati “Searches weblogs by keyword and for
links” Stem cell research
Blogdigger blog search
Hot topic searches Blogdex – top contagious information Bloglines – today’s hot topics (most popular links)
Searches find the really big science debates?
Specialist research tools
Commercial software Intelliseek/IBM
Mozdeh RSS monitor Generates sub-collections Generates word time series Allows keyword searches Identifies hot topics
Mozdeh Science Concern Corpus
A collection of blog postings containing a fear word AND a science wordTrend detection used to identify hot “science fear” topicsData cleaning to remove spamNeed manual scanning of list of words experiencing biggest usage increase
Classification of top 5 words
Word Max. daily increase (feeds)
Classification
stem 19% Science fear (stem cell research)
orlean 16% Information (about hurricane)
hurricane
16% Duplicate of ‘orlean’
katrina 15% Duplicate of ‘orlean’
june 14% Temporal descriptor
Classification of top 200 words
0 20 40 60 80
Fear of Science
Information
Progress
Threat Prediction
Other
Duplicate
Temporal Descriptor
Random
Hot science fear words
7.5% oftop 200WordsRepresentnew publicfears ofSciencestories
E.g. new medical cure
The wordscome from multiplestories
Unexpected results?
Social science research Sudden burst of discussion over fears of the
economic theories of Karl Rove, an influential advisor to George Bush
Computer security Concern over spyware features in a
software vendor’s products Research showing that consumers’ pin
numbers could be revealed by poor printing
Conclusions
Many free tools support exploration of Consumer Generated MediaAlso room for specialist research tools
References
http://www.blogpulse.com/http://www.blogpulse.com/www2006-workshop/http://www.creen.org/
Thelwall, M., Prabowo, R. & Fairclough, R. (2006, to appear). Are raw RSS feeds suitable for broad issue scanning? A science concern case study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Acknowledgement
The work was supported by a European Union grant for activity code NEST-2003-Path-1. It is part of the CREEN project (Critical Events in Evolving Networks, contract 012684, http://www.creen.org/)
Link Analysis Manifesto
Links are: A wonderful new source of information
about relationships between people, organisations and information
An easy to collect data source
But: Results should be interpreted with care
Part 2 Contents
Academic link analysis –mainly from an information science perspectiveA general social science link analysis methodologyCommercial applications
Why Count Links?Individual hyperlinks may reflect connections between web page contents or creatorsCounts of large numbers of hyperlinks may reflect wider underlying social processes Links may reflect phenomena that have previously been difficult to study E.g. informal scholarly communication
Why Count University Links?To map patterns of communication between researchers in a countryWhich universities collaborate a lot?Which universities collaborate with government or industry?Which universities are using the web effectively?
Counting links
Search engines will count them for you!Yahoo! advanced queries, e.g. Links from Wolves Uni. to Oxford Uni. Or back
domain:ox.ac.uk AND linkdomain:wlv.ac.uk domain:wlv.ac.uk AND linkdomain:ox.ac.uk
Google link queries Find links to specific URLs, e.g. links to the
University home pagelink:www.wlv.ac.uk
Counting links
Can use a special purpose web crawler or robot Visits all the pages in a web site Counts the links in the site Can use “advanced” counting
methods
Links to UK universities against their research
productivity
The reason for the strong correlation is the quantity of Web publication, not its quality
This is different to citation analysis
Most links are only loosely related to research90% of links between UK university sites have some connection with scholarly activity, including teaching and research But less than 1% are equivalent to citations
So link counts do not measure research dissemination but are more a natural by-product of scholarly activity Cannot use link counts to assess research Can use link counts to track an aspect of
communication
Language is a factor in international interlinking
English the dominant language for Web sites in the Western EUIn a typical country, 50% of pages are in the national language(s) and 50% in EnglishNon-English speaking extensively interlink in English
12,379,256
2,888,072
1,094,442
1,008,353
962,092
941,420
885,432
488,172
458,961
444,974
172,804
86,107
328,644
- 2,000,000 4,000,000 6,000,000 8,000,000 10,000,000 12,000,000 14,000,000
English
German
Spanish
Swedish
Dutch
Greek
French
Italian
Norwegian
Finnish
Portugese
Danish
Others
Lan
gu
age
Total university Web pages
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
fr it de es gr no nl pt ch be dk at se uk ie fi
Country
Un
ive
rsit
y W
eb
pa
ge
la
ng
ua
ge
s
OthersFrenchDutchSwedishGermanEnglish
Patterns of international communicationCounts of links between EU universities in Swedish are represented by arrow thickness.
International link patterns
The next slide is a (Kamada-Kawai) network of the interlinking of the “top” 5 universities in AEAN countries (Asia and Europe) with arrows representing at least 100 links and universities not connected removed.
The rich get richer on the web
Link creation obeys the ‘rich get richer’ law Sites which already have a lot of links
attract the most new links Some sites have a huge number of links:
most have one or none
Part 3: A General Social Science Link Analysis MethodologyA general framework for using link counts in social sciences research For research into link creation or Together with other sources, for research into
other online or offline phenomena
Applicable when there are enough links relevant to the research question to count For collections of large web sites or For large collections of small web sites
Nine stages for a research project
1. Formulate an appropriate research question, taking into account existing knowledge of web structure
2. Conduct a pilot study
3. Identify web pages or sites that are appropriate to address the research question
Nine stages for a research project
4. Collect link data from a commercial search engine or a personal crawler, taking appropriate accuracy safeguards
5. Apply data cleansing techniques to the links, if possible, and select an appropriate counting method
6. Partially validate the link count results through correlation tests, if possible
Nine stages for a research project
7. Partially validate the interpretation of the results through a link classification exercise
8. Report results with an interpretation consistent with link classification exercise, including either a detailed description of the classification or exemplars to illustrate the categories
9. Report the limitations of the study and parameters used in data collection and processing
The theoretical perspective for link counting In order to be able to reliably interpret link counts, all links should be created individually and independently, by humans, through equivalent gravity judgments (e.g.,
about the quality of the information in the target page).
Additionally, links to a site should target pages created by the site owner or somebody else closely associated with the site.
Commercial applications
Find out who links to your web site More links mean more visitors Check if your web site is being recognised
Find out who isn’t linking to your site But is linking to a competitor’s web site! Gives ideas about where to get new
customers or links from
Takes an hour of advanced searches Simple but very valuable!
Co-authors
Ray Binns, Viv Cothey, Ruth Fairclough, Gareth Harries , Xuemei Li, Peter Musgrove, Teresa Page-Kennedy, Nigel Payne, Rudy Prabowo, Liz Price, David Stuart, David Wilkinson, Alesia Zuccala University of Wolverhampton.Rong Tang, Catholic University of America.Han-Woo Park, YeungNam University, South Korea.Paul Wouters, Andrea Scharnhorst. The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.