In the previous post I discussed how we can measure the relative importance of tags in a post, by calculating their weight, as
- weight of tag t= (number of people using t)/(total number of people)
I also said that:
Not only we could study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated by the tag clouds used by people of that culture. But we could even measure cultural eartquake by measuring the difference between the tag cloud being generated before a certain event, or after a certain event.
Independently Clay Shirky was coming at a similar conclusion, although he more focused on temporal changes that seem more signature of a particular subgroup of people all bookmarking a site at a certain time:
During a period of about 120 users’ additions of OIO, 20 or of them used the tag ‘ia’, putting it between #7 and #10 during that period. Now it is down to #17. This suggests that one or a few IA-oriented sites or mailing lists posted the link, and it got a flurry of attention from those taggers in a narrower window of time. This in turn suggests a conversationally tightly-knit IA community.
But let’s go back to the tag weight. Terrell Russell took the ball, and in one evening of programming presented a tool to actually see how the weights change in time.
Nothing to say about the tool. It works perfectly well, and although it can be enhanced in many little ways, it already is very useful. Not bad for one evening.
More interesting, from my point of view, is how, through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
No change
First of all I would like to show you the graph of a part of the culture where no changes are happening:
From the site: Nifty Corners. 1859 people having bookmarked it by now. The values soon converge to what we can expect to be their definite value (for the culture we are in).
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