[okfn-discuss] Gephi network visualization proposal for the Knight News Challenge

[Rufus Pollock]

Hi Sebastien,

To quickly echo Friedrich's comments: Gephi is a fantastic tool and I
think the area is definitely under-served. Secondly, would be very
interested (generally) in connecting Gephi to the DataHub and
OpenSpending more effectively.

Rufus

On 30 May 2012 15:30, Friedrich Lindenberg
<friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hey Sébastien,
>
> this is exciting! I've written about the need for such a tool here [1]
> and here [2] and I'm obviously a great fan of your work.
>
> I've also done some work on a versioned, multi-tenant backend to
> social graphs, which you can find at [3] - the docs are crap, but the
> thing is working and has both a normal REST and a GEXF export
> interface (to feed sigma.js, of course :). Really need to get into the
> habit of announcing this stuff :)
>
> Going forward, I'd love to learn more about your plans and would also
> recommend you apply not only to the KNC, but also to the African News
> Information Challenge.
>
> I do think such a tool would fill a very big need with advocates, for
> journalists I think you may have to push them a bit before they
> realize the full potential (start with investigatives).
>
> Regarding your idea of linking this to CKAN/OpenSpending: I believe
> this is how we will make both usable to advocates in the future. Our
> portals offer a lot of (somewhat raw) resource and we need to find a
> way for journalists and researchers to pull the bits that they really
> need into a workbench where they can connect it to other datasets,
> further evidence etc. Given they want to explore actor constellations
> etc., a graph representation may be much more natural to this than
> e.g. purely tabular data. Any good solution to this is going to have
> to do frustrating amounts of entity recognition and record linkage,
> though, before it becomes in any way useful and shiny.
>
> Let's talk if you're interested, I'm friedrich.cleversoft on Skype and
> on #okfn in FreeNode.
>
> Cheers,
>
>  - Friedrich
>
> [1] http://pudo.org/2011/12/19/sna.html
> [2] http://pudo.org/2012/05/15/shuttleworth.html (bottom section)
> [3] http://github.com/pudo/grano
>
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Sébastien Heymann
> <sebastien.heymann at gephi.org> wrote:
>> Dear OKF Team,
>>
>> I'm Sébastien Heymann, co-leader of the Gephi project
>> (https://gephi.org/), an open source tool to make sense with
>> relational data. I'm contacting you because we are considering to
>> apply for the next Knight News Challenge about data
>> (http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/faqs). Our idea is to create the
>> "Many Eyes" of networked data, for any kind of networks such as social
>> networks, interlocking directorates, email, Web, etc...and we need
>> your opinion on it.
>>
>> This project will be a web platform to host, explore, and communicate
>> networked data on the Web, mobile and newspapers. The goal is to speed
>> up the work of journalists for the analysis and communication of
>> networks. Users will be able to explore networks and edit data
>> collaboratively like in:
>> http://maps.e-diasporas.fr/index.php?focus=section&section=5
>>
>> Users will be also able to easily make embedded visualizations like
>> the following ones:
>> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9159131/Syria-Asma-and-Bashar-al-Assads-email-network.html
>> http://ecologie.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/04/16/facenuke-la-cartographie-du-lobby-nucleaire-francais/
>>
>> However we would like to know if this kind of tool fills some critical
>> needs for the journalists, and how to improve the proposal. What do
>> you think about the idea? I would be glad to discuss with you and your
>> expectations. I guess we might connect the platform to the Data Hub
>> and Open Spending to enable easy network analysis.
>>
>> Thank you very much for your time,
>>
>> Sébastien Heymann
>>
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