[Air-l] visualizing weblinks

[Frank Schaap]

In a quick reply to Steve and Sean's helpful hints and Bob's question:

An MA student I'm helping is researching feminist websites. As part of her
methodology she has operationalized the number of links on a website
connecting to other sites of the network she's identified. I figured it would
be helpful to be able to visualize the links between various websites, as
she's found that some websites link a lot and get linked to a lot, some less
and others get linked to and don't link out (etc.). That way a more
substantial conclusion could (probably) be gotten from linking the content
based analysis of the sites to the more technical aspects of the sites.

So, what the program should do in this case, is not to map the whole of _one_
site, but the links out (and preferably in again) of one site and its more or
less immediate neighbors in the network. That's why I said the program would
need to accept an URL (since it's other people's sites she's researching) and
a number of hops (from that URL to its neighbors and hopefully back again too)
so that the 'relative' location and connectedness of this site could be
examined. The program would thus, as Bob suggests, need a spider/crawler
function.

BTW, hints on related literature would be appreciated :)

A few quick comments on the programs:

> Internet Cartographer http://www.inventix.com/

Interesting, but works with your browser history, creating a visualization of
links between the sites you've visited. I haven't tried it out, but it appears
not to have an auto-crawler function.

> Astra SiteManager
> http://tryandbuy.mercuryinteractive.com/cgi-bin/portal/trynbuy/asm.jsp?pro
> d=8023

Strange. This URL several times didn't work, telling me my session had timed
out, but just now it opened without a hitch. This Astra Sitemanager again
seems to be geared towards examining one's own website, not 'researching'
someone elses.

> Site Manager http://www.sgi.com/software/sitemgr.html

Looks interesting, but seems geared toward one's own website, besides, I don't
have a box running Irix 6.2.

> http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/web_sites.html

Somehow I missed that page in the first round I trawled through
Cybergeography's pages...

There's an interesting program there, called WebTracer, but it's really nasty
trying to run it... I guess it's not called Beta for naught. If you want to
give it a try, save all your work, close all other programs. For me, it
wouldn't run with the 3D device set to D3D HAL (I _do_ have DirectX 7
installed), but it ran when I set it to RGB emulation. Even with the maximum
number of pages set to 100, it'll need some time to run...

The program will 'eat your mouse pointer', meaning that while it runs, you
can't move the mouse pointer out of its window. The only way to regain control
over your computer is to either click on the "Show Page" button in the screen,
which will bring up your browser and positions your mouse pointer in it, which
allows you to move to the close-button of the screen and kill the program (it
unceremoniously dies with an application error). Or you use ctrl+alt+del to
bring up the taskmanager (providing you're running NT/2000/XP) and using the
keyboard you kill the process.

With these precautions, it's a pretty nifty thing to see it put itself through
its paces.

> http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/surf.html

Again, these programs don't do what WebTracer and Web Stalker do, they rather
run on the stuff you have in your Favorites/Bookmarks.

> I'd also recommend I/O/D's Web Stalker at http://www.backspace.org/iod/

This one's pretty cool as well, runs just fine, but besides generating a
(quickly becoming cluttered) image, it doesn't seem to do much else. No
zooming in or repositioning your point of view in order to examine a certain
set of links/sites.

> R Rogers, ed., 2000,  Preferred Placement - Knowledge Politics on the Web,
> Maastricht: Jan van Eyck. (Martin Dodge has a piece in this as well.)

> R Rogers and N Marres, "Landscaping Climate Change: A mapping technique
> for
> understanding science and technology debates on the World Wide Web,"
> Public
> Understanding of Science, April 2000, http://www.iop.org/Journals/pu

I'll pass it on :)

> I hope that helps.

I hope so too :)

Cheers,

Frank.



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