[Air-L] choice of crawler?

[Robert Ackland]

Hi Anders,

Here are some brief answers.  Good luck with your research.

Anders Koed Madsen wrote:
[snip]
> Before making a final decision on which crawler to use I just wanted
> to know whether anyone of you have opinions about the the
> Issue-crawler in comparison to SoSciBot (http://socscibot.wlv.ac.uk/)
> and VOSON (http://voson.anu.edu.au/) or other crawlers. So:
> 
> -	What are the pro and cons of the different software-packages?
As I mentioned off-list to you just now, I'm not the best person to 
comment here but I'd be keen to know if anyone has done a comparison.

> -	Does any of them allow for detecting the timestamp of the link (when
> is it placed)? Or do you know of any crawlers that do that?
VOSON doesn't do this.  I don't think a crawler can collect this data, 
but I could be wrong.  I think the best you can do is infer date of 
link creation by comparing across the panels you plan to create e.g. 
if link from i to j that is present at time t wasn't present in time 
t-1, then it was created between t and t-1.

> -	Can the results of SoSciBot and VOSON be exported into UCI-net as
> well (I haven´t been able to figure that out from the sites)?
I'm not sure about SocSciBot (but can imagine it would) but with 
VOSON, the answer is yes.  In VOSON there is a facility to export the 
hyperlink network in pajek format and my understanding is that format 
can be read into UCInet.

> 
> All the best,
> 
> Anders Koed Madsen
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-------------------------------------
Dr Robert Ackland
Fellow and Masters Coordinator, Australian Demographic and Social 
Research Institute, The Australian National University

homepage: http://adsri.anu.edu.au/people/robert.php
project:  http://voson.anu.edu.au

Information about the Master of Social Research
(Social Science of the Internet specialisation):
http://adsri.anu.edu.au/study/msr.php
-------------------------------------