Weblogs for Research(ers)

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Weblogs for Research(ers)

• Anjo Anjewierden
• Human Computer Studies laboratory
• Faculty of Science
• University of Amsterdam
• http//anjo.blogs.com
• Many thanks to Lilia Efimova, Rogier Brussee,
  Robert de Hoog, Stephanie Hendrick
• and the blogosphere in general

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What is a weblog (1)?

• Most common descriptive definition a weblog is
• a personal journal,
• updated regularly,
• published on the internet and
• posts (entries) appear in reverse chronological
  order

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What is a weblog (2)?

• Weblogs are social as they encourage others to
  participate using two mechanisms
• Posts have an explicit point of reference called
  a permalink
• Permalinks make it possible for people to link to
  each others posts share and discuss
• Readers, possibly without a weblog, are invited
  to join as all posts have a comment link

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Anatomy of Weblogs

• For example my weblog

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Weblog Research is about

• Humans who share findings, thoughts, ideas and
  sometimes feelings in their weblogs
• Computers which make it possible to create
  weblogs, read weblogs, and to comment and to link
• Studies which analyse why and how people blog
  about what and to whom
• Laboratory weblog researchers need a stable
  environment in which to conduct their research

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Do we want to research weblogs

• Blog (short for weblog, we-blog) was word of the
  year 2004 by Merriam Webster. To blog, blogger,
  blogging, blogosphere, etc.
• Communications of the ACM (CACM) carried a
  special issue on weblogs (December 2004)
• Unfiltered and Public For the first time we get
  access to a large body of material on a
  particular person, written by that same person
• Research relevance Social studies, Knowledge
  Management (for professional weblogs), education,
  linguistics and even Semantic Blogging
  (combining Semantic Web and blogging) has been
  coined
• Compare Digital Cities research by Beckers / Van
  den Bersselaar (at SWI)

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BlogTrace the Laboratory (1)

• Weblogs are represented as HTML pages
• Complex layout, difficult to find the posts
• Manual research is extremely labour intensive
• There is a serious lack of tools that support
  weblog research

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BlogTrace the Laboratory (2)

• BlogTrace spider makes data collection and
  research a lot easier
• Automatically extracts posts from the HTML
• Generates the link structure of the weblog and
  represents it as RDF/OWL
• Generates an RSS feed that contains all posts for
  a weblog
• Implemented using induction algorithms, which
  learn what are posts and what is layout

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Ontologies used in BlogTrace

• DC Dublin core (names, dates, descriptions)
• FOAF Friend of a friend (documents, people)
• RSS 1.0 (RDF) Really simple syndication
  (representation of full posts)
• Link ontology, for example a link (href in HTML)
  becomes
• Link linksourceDocument lthttp///gt
• Link linktargetDocument lthttp///gt
• Link linkanchorText interesting site
• Etc.

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Weblogs can now be studied

• Even using Semantic Web technology (RDF/OWL)

linkWeblogPostLink rdfssubClassOf
linkSimpleLink rdfscomment "A
WeblogPostLink is a SimpleLink if and only if
both the source and the target documents
are weblog posts (RSS items)." rdfslabel
"WeblogPostLink" owlintersectionOf
(linkSimpleLink a owlRestriction
owlonProperty linksourceDocument
owlsomeValuesFrom rssitem a
owlRestriction
owlonProperty linktargetDocument
owlsomeValuesFrom rssitem ).
linkWeblogPostLink rdfssubClassOf linkLink
rdfscomment "A WeblogPostLink is a Link if and
only if both the source and the target documents
are weblog posts (RSS items)"
owlintersectionOf (linkLink a
owlRestriction owlonProperty
linksourceDocument owlsomeValuesFrom
rssitem a owlRestriction
owlonProperty linktargetDocument
owlsomeValuesFrom rssitem ).
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Some Weblog Research Questions

• Weblog communities
• Do they exist?
• How can they be defined and found?
• What is the social structure?
• What are the conventions in the community?
• Text analysis of weblogs
• What do people blog about (terms, topics)?
• Do they share terminology?
• Can personal conceptualisations be extracted?
• Conversations
• Can linked weblog posts be seen as conversations?
• Can we identify when there is a knowledge flow?

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Implementations and Papers

• Weblog communities
• Visual Settlements
• Graphically displays weblog community linkage
  based on a weblog is a city metaphor
• Community determined by Virtual Settlements
  paper (Efimova Hendrick, 2005)
• Text analysis of weblogs
• Sigmund (Anjewierden, Brussee Efimova, 2004)
• Co-occurrence based statistical algorithm that
  identifies concepts and their relations for a
  weblog
• Conversations
• Knowledge flows (Anjewierden, De Hoog, Brussee
  Efimova, 2005)
• Hypothesis chance of a knowledge flow is greater
  when the sender and receiver share
  conceptualisations

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Visual Settlements

• Idea
• Can we compress a weblog to a single picture?
• Such that we can use the picture to compare it to
  other weblogs in a community
• And, of course, learn something
• Inspiration
• Maps in general
• Books by Edward Tufte on Information Design
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  (1983)
• Envisioning Information (1990)
• Beautiful Evidence (2005 forthcoming)
• (Discovered Tufte by blog reading)

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My blog as a Visual Settlement
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Anatomy of Visual Settlements
Without links in the community (house)
I link to someone (Im at work)
Someone links to me (Im in the park)
Size number of words in the post
Layout if I link to earlier posts they are close
Time early post in center, radiate outwards
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Sigmund

• Idea
• Using co-occurrence to determine whether terms
  are related
• Related terms might point to conceptualisations
  of the blogger
• And, these conceptualisations might be shared by
  other bloggers
• Supported by
• Tools that are part of my regular research on
  methods to support ontology development from
  documents
• In particular term extraction and named entity
  recognition

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Making a Difference

• Idea
• In a community of bloggers it is likely
  terminology is shared
• Finding the shared terms is interesting (see
  Sigmund)
• But a blogger is a person and not a web page
• So, what makes them different?
• Implementation
• Run Sigmund on all blogs in a community
• Find terms that are common for a particular blog
  and not common for others in the community
• Example Making a Difference post

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Knowledge Flows

• Idea and Motivation
• When bloggers link to a post of other bloggers
• Could it be a knowledge flow?
• Motivated by potential use as a knowledge
  management tool
• Implementation
• Use Sigmunds co-occurrence algorithm
• Term overlap in linked posts is the main metric
• Make a distinction between shared and agreed
  terms (used by both bloggers) and private terms
  (used by one of blogger)

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Knowledge Flows

• Idea and Motivation
• When bloggers link to a post of other bloggers
• Could it be a knowledge flow?
• Motivated by potential use as a knowledge
  management tool
• Implementation
• Use Sigmunds co-occurrence algorithm
• Term overlap in linked posts is the main metric
• Make a distinction between shared and agreed
  terms (used by both bloggers) and private terms
  (used by one of blogger)

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Weblogs for Researchers

• Experiment (Metis project)
• Six researchers (previously non-bloggers) started
  a weblog to get hands-on experience
• Two gave up rather early
• One thinks about underpants when blogging
• Three (includes myself) continue after the
  experiment finished
• Evaluation
• Posts are not emails (everybody can read them!)
• Posts are not academic papers
• Developing a blogging style (how and about what
  you blog) is difficult and different for everybody

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Conclusions (1)

• Blogging as a tool for researchers
• Try it!
• Works for me, both reading and writing
• By sharing ideas on your blog, you may get help!

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Conclusions (2)

• Enormous amount of data (paradise for someone
  like me)
• Tempting to continue my own weblog research
• If others have better ideas than I have, and some
  do, I gladly return to my role as supporting
  others to do their weblog research