Blogpulse is a website that tracks blog trends. Sorta like Google Trends tracking searches. Crazy huh?I am a woman obsessed. Last week in class (Paradigms of Architectural Research) we had a speaker, Lucio, from the statistics department who came in to talk about data mining. It was as if the clouds opened up and God himself spoke to me. I could barely hear the sound of Lucio's voice over the sound of the angels singing, but oh I heard him.
So there are a number of aspects that interest me regarding data mining, but visualization has been the past 24 hours of my life, so lets start there.
This week in class (Contemporary Middle Eastern Cities) we are studying Tehran, Iran. I was feeling frustrating about creating the visual response (I am usually really stuck about what to map) so I listened to NPR while I was killing time on the internets, that's what it's called now isn't it? Anyways, I was listening to Fresh Air who was focusing on the Iranian presidential speech given by Ahmadinejad and which was interpreted by a man who holds both American as well as Iranian citizenship. This is like, nearly impossible now, but he is a reporter who has agreed to do these often controversial speech translations in trade for the right to write about it. He blogs too, which is where the insanity begins. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole so let me know if any of this goes over your head:
Turns out there is a HUGE population of bloggers in Iran. In fact, it's the third largest nation of bloggers. How is this? Well according to the TimesOnline article, "weblogistan," or so the Persian blog culture is dubbed by us western bloggers, is comprised of a population that is over 90% literate, over 70% of which is under the age of 30. From this we understand that they are mostly young and mostly readers. According to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (whazzap Harvard?!) given the repressive media environment in Iran today, blogs may represent the most open public communications platform for political discourse. The peer-to-peer architecture of the blogosphere is more resistant to capture or control by the state than the older, hub and spoke architecture of the mass media model. This is a map that they put together of the overall content of the 700,000-something Persian blogs out there:
I spent the weekend reading these blogs which run the gamut of subject and depth. There is the inane, the brave, the heartfelt, the insightful, the everyday. “My blog is a blank page,” writes one young Iranian blogger. “Sometimes I stretch out on this page in the nude . . . now and again I hide behind it. Occasionally I dance on it.” That may not sound like a call to arms, but in a country where the music is dying it may be the harbinger of revolution. So what else can be mapped?
Here is the aforementioned speech by the Iranian president in a word cloud:
Here the size of the text directly correlates to the number of times the word was said in the speech. This is 300 words (obviously I've omitted common English words like is, and, or, the, but, etc.) This was created using a
But here is the baddest (and by bad I obviously mean good) mapping of them all:
Please ignore how cheesy it is to have this in the shape of Tehran. I'm still working on it. But the point is the content. Using my host, blogspot, I researched blogs that are written from Tehran. Stripping the text from their RSS feed, I generated one HUGE word document. Replacing all the spaces with returns, (which Alex and I spent a large portion of Saturday night doing) I got a HUGE word list. The list got sorted alphabetically and bingo! I was able to use excel to count the number of times the words got repeated. I picked 260 of the words for this display and made the point size of the text, the number of times it was written. Interesting comparisons? They typed the word Obama more than Ahmadinejad. They wrote more about porn than voting. The word "war" was written 69 times. The word movie was written 83 times. Conclusion? Well you can make your own, I have more data around here that I want to map.
Post Script- I learned that the word barf means snow in Farsi. It was the brand name of some laundry detergent which was the subject of a photo blog post. I love when this happens in language.