You are here: Foswiki>Dmi Web>ToolDatabase>ToolIssueGeographer (15 Mar 2011, KoenMartens)Edit Attach

Issue Geographer


Geo-locates the organizations on an Issue Crawler map, using whois information, and visualizes the organizations' registered locations on a geographical map.
 

Instructions

Use the Issuegeographer to show on a geographical map where organizations in an issue network are based. The Issuegeographer takes Issuecrawler results, scrapes a whois.net service, and plots the sites' registration address (latitude / longitude of the city) to a geographical map.

As a starting point:

  • upload an Issuecrawler result file (.xml), or:

  • submit a list of URLs (either with or without the http://), one URL per line.

You can also choose to create an empty map and add the locations manually:

emptymap.jpg

See the IssueCrawler movie for an explanation on how to use the Issuecrawler and the Issuegeographer.

Sample project

The A2K, or access to knowledge, movement comprises an array of civil society organizations and academics, and is concerned with easing the means by which knowledge may be circulated between legal regimes. Prior to the A2K conference at Yale in April 2007, the question arose about the composition of the movement. How global is it? How may one characterize the distribution of northern and southern organizations.

The list of organizations involved in the movement was supplied by one of the participants at the conference. The organizations were entered into the Issuecrawler, and co-link analysis was performed. The resulting map showed the dominance of particularly U.S.-based organizations. Here is a rank list of actors in the A2K issue network, per April 2007, with the ranking based on inlink count from network?

Top 10 Actors per inlink count
1 - creativecommons.org - 57
2 - eff.org - 48
3 - cptech.org - 34
4 - epic.org - 28
5 - lessig.org - 26
6 - aclu.org - 26
7 - gnu.org - 25
8 - icann.org - 25
9 - wipo.int - 23
10 - cdt.org - 23

The Issuegeographer visualizes the places of actors, that is, the locations of the organizations in the network. The A2K movement appears to be largely a 'northern' movement, with a smattering of representatives from the south.

A2K_Geographical_Picture_showing_South_links.png

A2K Network Geography, April 2007. Data by the Issuecrawler. Visualization by the Issuegeographer. Annotated southern organizations and places.

Other projects using this tool

Dmi Protocols
Protocols devised by the DMI This page is being replaced gradually by our new research protocols and methods page. Hyperlink Analysis * Perfom an issue craw...
Geo
Geo The Revenge of Geography Place based Space. Idea of spaceless space versus place based space and the connection between cyberspace and geo space. Cyberspa...

Topic revision: r5 - 15 Mar 2011, KoenMartens
This site is powered by FoswikiCopyright © by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
Ideas, requests, problems regarding Foswiki? Send feedback